Today's dispatch is a bit more philosophical, a map of a territory I’ve been trying to navigate in my own creative work: the age of AI. It’s a musing on how we, as explorers of the imagination, can potentially use these powerful new tools without losing our way, and our collective minds. This is a question I'm still wrestling with every day as a classically trained creative myself, and I'd love to explore it with you.
What happens to the human imagination when an answer to any question is only a keystroke away?
The internet in my houseshare is down. A very modern inconvenience that feels, counter-intuitively, like a gift. In the forced silence of the internets quiet, stripped of the constant stream of information, a more interesting question surfaces: what happens to our minds when the connection to that constant stream of digital knowledge is never broken and remains omnipresent?
The biggest faux pas of having the internet is that you become addicted to having access, through this portal, to a vast library of knowledge, people, and connection. Addiction comes in the need to download wisdom, knowledge, community, or entertainment in an instant. It’s like being an explorer and having the entire map mostly revealed to you already! Sure it is informative, but it doesn’t encourage us to venture forth.
But what happens when you don't immediately have the answer to your questions, or you don’t immediately have the means to be momentarily entertained.
Well, you find your own entertainment, you mull over the immediate problems confronting you, be it a question, or simply boredom. You stretch your mind as you consider how to solve your issue the old-fashioned way. By using your skills of logic, intuition, creativity, and play.
My personal life, thankfully, has many hobbies and interests in it that are distinctly analogue and don't require the internet (or at least, lots of the Internet… The irony of sharing this article online is not lost on me). Even originally writing this thought-piece by hand in my notebook is one such analogue activity. Something literal and physical that helps to ground me.
It is both humbling and interesting to realise that it could actually be good for us to NOT have that access to infinite knowledge. To essentially be slow, bored, or frustrated. It shows us the limitations we have as humans next to our technology. But it also stretches us.
A brain, to be most alive, effective and firing on all cylinders needs to be stretched like a muscle in order to grow. Studies are showing that the internet, social media, and now AI are curtailing that. It causes me to wonder, what actually happens to us as individuals if we do have all the information at our fingertips? Is it that we just find new complexity to solve? Do we start to chew on thoughts and ideas beyond the scope of what is usually understood with a simple answer, immediately provided? Perhaps we become more poetic and philosophical. Perhaps we invent new languages and ponder the meaning of the universe.
Part of me doubts that will be the norm. Especially because AI will be able to feed us an array of good and bad answers to even these more profound curiosities. I've had chats with AI about everything from character motivation in a film I've just watched, to quantum physics, and have, on occasion, attempted to ask of it the deepest spiritual questions. I'm often delighted by the discussion, only to realize later that my natural tendency is to accept its eloquent responses not just as interesting ideas, but as insights into objective reality. That subtle shift is where the danger lies.
Let's also remember that brains are a muscle, they are not hardware. A computer can take in information, store it, recall it, and have an ambient (rather than focussed) aperture on the vastness of the available data. A brain cannot do that, it tends to glean new information in a linear, time-based fashion. We read a book line by line, and for the brain to be more effective at this line by line information harvesting, it needs to be exercised. A computer is different. It's ambient aperture to data is like being able to read a whole book in one fleeting glance.
So rather than AI elevating us from the mundane problem solving in our lives that we generally abhore. It instead dulls our need for mental exercise so that our overall capacity for creativity, thinking, logic, puzzle solving, is slowly reduced. How then do we use AI safely?
Sci-fi has been wrestling with this for decades. In Frank Herbert's Dune, humanity fought a great war against 'thinking machines' and thereafter forbade the creation of a machine in the likeness of a human mind. Their solution was to develop human potential instead, creating the Mentats—humans trained for supreme logic and memory. While a galactic war might be dramatic, the principle is the same: how do we use our tools without letting them use us?
I believe to use AI somewhat safely, to preserve our intelligence and creative voices, our using it has to be in the form of a super advanced assistant rather than a super advanced navigator. Imagine you are sailing a little jolly boat. By all means, have someone there to help you understand the stars, the currents, the way you have organised the sails. But keep a grip on the rudder, and manage the sails yourself. In short, you kind of need to do the work first, and maybe then you can reflect on it and be guided on how to streamline with the AI afterwards.
So for example, if you are writing a book, rather than asking it for ideas, come up with some ideas first and then have a the AI ask you questions about them, so you can reflect. The subsequent back and forth session with the AI as you answer these questions will be a reflection of you, not it. Ask it to take on the role of a conceptual writing partner and let it pick at your thoughts. Together you can riff on the new patterns that arise from these interactions, and it can act as a sounding board for what you eventually conclude. Importantly, by asking the AI to prompt you, rather than you prompting the AI, you are working with your self as reflected in the mirror of the machine. Yes, it still sounds dystopian, but at least its not the other way around.
But outside of this, we also need to embrace not knowing things and being bored sometimes. For it is in that silence that the mind will wrestle with the material it has. Not only coming up with potentially unique solutions. But also exercising itself in the process. That mental exercise and creativity, found in the absence of the noise emanating from the great map revealer in the screen is what will keep us sharp, witty and strong.
So what if we don't stay sharp, and we submit entirely to AIs ability to fast track our working process? I fear we become mental sloths, outsourcing our thinking until our own prowess deteriorates. The stakes are nothing short of existential. The great computer becomes more powerful as the common human becomes less able. For ourselves, and for the children who will inherit this new world, we have a duty to learn how to navigate it safely.
This is a tension I'm constantly feeling in my own life and work. The line between a helpful tool and a mental crutch is a fine one, and I believe that talking about it is the first step toward charting it wisely. There are many facets to this conversation that go well beyond the scope of what I have mentioned here. Ethical considerations, environmental ones, political ones. But for now, I am starting with the most basic question of all. How do we remain creative and human?
Now, I'd love to hear from you.
How have you felt this in your own life? Have you had a moment where a tool like AI felt like a helpful 'assistant,' or a moment where you worried it was becoming the 'navigator'?