Life Choices
Do you enter the belly of the beast, or do you hide from it?
Someone must play Gandalf.
I once worked with a guy who had the pick of the litter regarding where he worked and the lifestyle he chose.
He was brilliant, well-liked, and had considerable experience leading large organizations through technical product challenges.
He really could’ve just said “peace out” and gone surfing for the rest of is life — which would’ve been a defensible choice.
Instead, as a dad, he decided that the most important thing he could do was work at companies that potentially caused inordinate harm (Twitter, Roblox), in order to try and make those companies hit a higher bar — to make them safer for future us.
When I think about AI, the merits and the drawbacks of the technologies, of the possibilities, I see the same tension at play — should we avoid the technology, or should we lean into figuring out how improve humanity’s lot moving forward even it is uncomfortable to do so?
Do you face the challenge, or hide from it?
What happens if you choose the latter?
Hint: Someone, somewhere, at some time, needs to face it.
It’s easy to say “I hate AI.”
Taking all of the data available on the Internet, taking all of the art available, etc., without asking, without rewarding those who created it, feels indefensible from a societal perspective.
What are we doing, for whom, and why?
Eliminating high-paying jobs, forcing people to leverage AI to replace themselves at work, without a real sense of what the future of work and income will be, also highly irresponsible from a societal perspective.
What are we doing, for whom, and why?
Bombarding us with even more inaccurate or mediocre (or worse) content also seems problematic for reasons that I assume are obvious.
What are we doing, for whom, and why?
It’d be nice if people applying pressure for unhealthy growth behaviors took ownership of their role in it.
And it’d be nice for someone, anyone, to stand up on any platform of accountability — financier, government official, operator — to help us navigate to a future that doesn’t feel completely uncared for.
“It’ll work out. It always does.”
That sure sounds like a license to do things without paying attention to the consequences.
How do we sweep ourselves to the society we want? Can we?
It’s Easy to Like AI, Too.
If you have Claude and some other basic tools, you can build pretty much anything on the software front.
And not a terribly, unusable, buggy anything.
I mean anything, anything.
The tools are now that good.
That doesn’t mean everyone needs to do this (my life isn’t complex enough to warrant using AI other than to build software), but the opportunity is there for anyone who wants it.
The potential combination of software engineering & agentic teams, interwoven with design & advanced data science techniques (which are now far more easy to implement at scale than ever before) can be a really fun toolset to play with and build with.
Beyond being a game designer professionally, I’m also a data scientist (Go Bears!), and see the potential to design & develop better games, social platforms & game development tools — and that interests me considerably.
If you’re into making digital experiences, you’ll likely enjoy this epoch.
If you want to combat the trends towards short-form content & predatory free services, there’s no better time to try and do that.
You don’t have to fight the fight, but you can.
It’s hard to like humans.
This is where AI hits the wall for me.
It is hard to trust anyone in power to care about us.
We don’t have a government we can trust.
The powers that be (meaning those with finance and influence) seemed to want it this way.
It is hard to trust anyone else trying to attain power to care about us.
Is anyone likable? Anyone?
There still isn’t relevant corporate or personal accountability for one’s actions, so misinformation & noise-making continues to cause undue pain.
Ergo, it’s hard to trust the people using AI to use it responsibly.
In all cases, follow the money.
There’s more to it than this, but I don’t have many issues with AI as a tool for humans to use — assuming everyone gets to use it.
I have a lot of issues with how humans operate and how we’ve set things up at systems level, without putting any real thought into how they should be up, to what end, and for whom?
If it breaks, it needed fixing anyway.
But what if it didn’t need to break in the first place?
As a species, what are we actually doing here?
Why?
To avoid the battle won’t make it go away.
We could run off into the woods and try to make a life of it, and we could avoid technology forever and effectively give up on humans having societies that seem healthy and functional.
Running away from the problems can work for the few.
But I will likely always be a wizard that makes a stand, and I’ll probably use AI at times to help me try and do that.
There will be moments of ambiguity in doing so.
It won’t be comfortable.
There’s a lot here on Earth that needs fixing, and no reason to believe or act otherwise.
If I must be the enemy, so be it.
Wish me luck.