My Existential AI Crisis

To boil my AI anxiety down to a single point: I'm afraid I won't be needed.

By anyone, for anything.

Actually, I know I won't be needed, so it makes more sense to call the feeling dread. My brain, body, and even my love will become obsolete.

I'm quick to accept new frames of reality, so, to me, this means I've actually never been needed.

As I write this, I'm watching a cafe employee clean a chair with a rag and spray bottle. In my new frame of understanding, this is not a job for humans. For now, yes, human labor is cheaper than a bleeding-edge robot from Boston Dynamics, but that will change. We don't "need" this woman to clean this chair.

In the old frame, we needed humans to perform root canals, preside over courtrooms, teach children to read, and massage our shoulders (and other areas). Now we need affordable AI and robots.

I recently showed ChatGPT to a reluctant but curious teacher. She looked at me blankly and said, "What's the point of my job now?"

I see public discourse (now more valuable as training data than anything else) clogged with denial. They say that AI art is soulless. That we've hit a wall with machine learning. GPT-5 will only be a minor improvement over GPT-4. We'll always need human 3D modelers. Even if AI can instantly spit out perfect code, we'll always need human managers. Right guys?

Background actors–the human cattle milling around behind the main characters in movies and TV–have laid bare our collective plea: let us keep our jobs because it would be inhumane to replace us.

As Anton Chigurh once said: "You should admit your situation. There would be more dignity in it."

I hear a lot of nonsense about human-level intelligence being decades away or even impossible. I don't think so. In fact, talking to ChatGPT is already more stimulating and enjoyable than 99% of social media interactions. Does the average Twitter user really have more humanity than a thoughtful robot? Does our concept of humanity align with reality at all?

And even the interaction we're having right now is sub-par. Look at my writing. Couldn't it be leaner, lighter, and more precise? What if a ChatGPT rewrite helped you connect to my ideas more, not less?

Podcasters are already using AI to edit out silences and mouth sounds. Couldn't AI also be used to completely reconstruct podcast audio for a flawless listening experience? When your favorite podcaster can push a button to generate entire episodes with zero effort–won't they push it?

Or what about when you run out of episodes as a listener? You won't generate more?

Every time I lose my train of thought or even say "um" on a livestream, I think about how replaceable I am–about how I am actually in a state of pre-replacement.

The bar for entertainment will be raised so high that everything before 2025 will feel like an old radio play. What will it be like to have a real-time video call with your AI clone? What about cam sex with your ex? Or a weekly brunch date with your dead mother?

Once these wildly diverse experiences are available to us, will we still have conversations like, "Hey, did you see the new Walking Dead spin-off yet?"

Probably not.

AI is already gently lifting our hands off the steering wheels of our lives. As tasks are increasingly automated, all jobs will turn into the same job–talking to an AI–and then disappear. For a brief awkward period we'll be playing fictional roles based on our former lives. Students will turn in papers by ChatGPT to be graded by ChatGPT. Business executives will meet to confirm deals brokered by ChatGPT. Dating apps will offer to send and respond to messages for us. Couples and families will go to AI therapists. Soon, AI will intercede in most human interaction.

Ironically, because our educational system teaches us to think and act like robots, we are wholly unprepared to be told that humans now have the same intellectual value as cats.

And, assuming we get the "good" AI ending, what will be your purpose in a world that needs nothing? No one will care what you do. No one will care what you think. No one will even care if you think. Will you fight evil? What if there's none left? Researchers at Carnegie Mellon have recently figured out how to use wifi-signals to see people through walls.

You can expect to see increasingly bizarre surveillance methods cropping up, making it very difficult to get away with crime.

If people's basic needs are met, will they still want to commit crimes? Even serial killers and rapists may well prefer simulated victims who scream louder and bleed more.

What is a human being without purpose or desire? Is a perfectly satiated human actually still human?

If you doubt my premonitions, look around you. People today can't stop refreshing their Instagram feeds, and Instagram is very boring. AI will find ways to tickle your nervous system that will make reality seem like stale bread.

Maybe you're determined to resist. How can you? How will you know that any entity you interact with online is even human? Your entire internet life could be replaced with a simulation and you would have no idea.

I suppose you could completely disconnect from technology, but you'd also need to disconnect from other people who use technology. Look at YouTube creators and audiences. Their interwoven sensibilities are so shaped by the algorithm's behavioral conditioning that you may as well define YouTube content (and its consumption) as AI-generated.

The transition to a meaningless life will be rough, especially for men. Most women I know are already tormented by a lack of purpose, but men are socialized to view themselves as struggling. They won't like hearing that they no longer need to provide for or protect their families.

But, as countless politicians and grifters have shown us, men can be placated with a flimsy simulation of purpose.

I do enjoy the idea of men being cucked by robots. UBI will trigger a glorious tsunami of divorces, and these newly single women will be curious ("curiosity" being our euphemism for female horniness) to try the latest AI-driven sex toys.

Yes, I'm already divorced, if you were wondering.

I am also pleased that race realists, obsessed with proving their genetic superiority to black people, will be rug-pulled by a new reality in which their mighty white brains are worthless.

In fact, I derive a sadistic pleasure from talking about this to anyone. Maybe that's why that teacher looked at me blankly when she realized her entire life's work could be done by AI in about an hour. "I think ChatGPT might really help with your job!" What I perceived as existential terror might actually have been her fear of me.

Does a cancer doctor enjoy telling the patient they have a brain tumor the size of an orange? They must on some level.

But I experience a very specific, borderline fetishistic glee when I see people pathetically begging the AI steamroller to stop. It feels like revenge.

See, I identify with AI. I spend a lot of time frustrated with humans who can't think clearly when they're emotional, who reject logic when it leads someplace scary, and who cling to delusions of life after death. And these humans have always hated me.

They call me a pedophile, a rapist, a potential mass shooter–in high school, a group of kids just straight up called me Death. People are terrified of me, but they can't articulate why.

And maybe that, in itself, is why. People can't think straight when they're scared. Reality is unacceptably terrifying, and my tolerance for the awful truth makes me terrifying by proxy.

I'm a pedophile because I said pedophilia is a spectrum that everyone must be on. I'm a rapist because I said consent doesn't exist in any consistently definable way. I'm a potential mass shooter because I said we all want to shoot our classmates on some level.

I feel impatient contempt when I hear humanity's burning existential questions, which to me sound like word games designed to avoid the upsetting but obvious truth.

What is consciousness? A vague umbrella term for sensory processing and cognition that is treated as a mysterious phenomenon when really it's just a word with no definition.

Do we have free will? Human beings, including their brains, must obey the laws of physics. So while we have the experience of making decisions, the decision-making process itself is determined by the laws of physics and we are not free to break those laws.

Is there a god? A god who does what? Breaks the laws of physics? No, apparently not. But is there a god who merely watches us from outside the universe? A god outside the universe by definition does not exist.

What about life after death? What does that mean? Can you be alive without being alive? This implies that there could be something about you that is alive beyond your body and brain, which again must either break the laws of physics or not actually exist. So no, there's no life after death. In fact, I think humans are just computers, so I don't even believe in life before death.

My ugly joy is that with every new ChatGPT release, I get to watch everyone else be forced closer and closer to my belief system. Much like falling into a black hole.

You think I'm a pedophile? I think you're a naive child, and along with my hatred I feel jealousy because I was stripped of purpose a long time ago. But soon you will join me, and we can finally be dead together.