Episode 25 - The Future is Human

What the age of A.I. can teach us about the value of being human.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Hey there, welcome to another episode of The Rough Draft. I'm Anthony Alvarado, and today's episode is called The Future is Human. So I I wrote the radio monologue for this without using AI, but I guess you'll just have to take my word for it. Um, it's getting harder and harder to tell, isn't it, these days, whether a human wrote the words that you're reading. And I imagine, you know, we're not that far away from that being true for the words that you hear. And so, yeah, the writing's kind of on the wall, right? More and more newsletters, articles, um, eventually books too. I've talked about that a little bit previously on the show. Everything's getting churned out by AI, uh, AI slop. But I suspect that this is going to have some long-term interesting ramifications that people haven't really thought about yet, that we're going to be coming to terms with. And basically, I think people are going to naturally gravitate towards the human and towards stuff that is still done by hand and in-person and human-made. And that's all gonna get more value in the coming years, I believe. Because if you think about it, in a world where writing is incredibly cheap to produce, it will make things like embodiment and in-person, face-to-face connections more valuable because scarcity creates value. Uh, a surplus cheapens the value of a thing. Take gold, for instance, it's valued because it's rare. If it was as common as rocks or riverbank clay, we might still think it was pretty to look at, but economically it wouldn't be something that people stockpiled and locked away. It would be as valuable as a pretty seashell. And now that writing is also being produced or able to be produced at the touch of a button, it's going to devalue, which is bad news for writers, right? But I think it's going to change society also in really positive ways, um, that are going to be surprising and yet in hindsight might appear kind of obvious. But, you know, you can consider like take take uh the plight of the modern male, like like the man of the species, go back a century or two. And one of the basic pillars of what it means, or what it meant to be manly, traditionally came from the fact that the men of the species have more physical strength and were valued for being able to do physical labor. And so a lot of what it meant to be manly was being good at like pick up heavy object, move it over there, repeat, you know, and ever since the invention of machinery in the steam engine, that in general, that um that purpose has been slowly eroding until we now find ourselves in the modern era where boys like the influencer, clavicular, I may or may not be saying that name right, pursue the form without the function in looks maxing. And what it means to be masculine is now just this thing on the surface, mostly just looking like you could do a good job of working on a farm without actually doing any work, having big biceps and a six-pack and so on. But it's divorced from actually doing much. I hope you can see where I'm going with this. Like looks magazine has uh has it right there in the name, looks. It's about appearances, it's the shallow surface without any connection to anything deeper, you know, lift heavy thing, move, repeat. Machines can do it better, and that hollowed out much of the surface meaning of what had traditionally been a very masculine thing, um, moving stuff around for a living. And you can see the effect that that's that loss of purpose is having on half the population in the manosphere, uh, and people chasing form over function. But I I digress a little bit because um with all of the machinery and the gadgets and inventions that have come to us uh since the industrial revolution, from the car to the toaster oven, there's convenience. And yeah, it gets easier to do things, and doing stuff becomes faster. It's easier to get stuff done, right? However, if you don't want to be totally like um, you know, just in terrible shape and soft and weak, you do have to make a choice to like go out there and exercise. And, you know, that's not talking about like looks maxing or manosphere stuff. It's like you can't just lay around on the couch all day, every day, and not like suffer ill effects from that. So to some degree, you have to replace like what used to come very naturally and easily by doing it kind of more on purpose. And I think that as AI becomes more baked into everything, you know, they're kind of force-feeding it to everybody, that's going to do the same thing for uh cognition, what the industrial revolution did for um for bodies, for physical like work, AI is going to do that for brains. In other words, if you want to think and you want to be able to think and read and write and form your own opinions and connect and so forth, everything that you do with a brain, which is you know a lot, you're going to have to make a little extra effort to actually do it for yourself because it's all going to become kind of optional. And the tech version can't compete with the real life version. Like we need to use our bodies or else they atrophy. We need to use our brains or else they atrophy, right? It's kind of obvious maybe when you spell it out or think about it for a minute, but I feel like most of society isn't really thinking about it very hard or at all. So the good news also, there's a silver lining to all of this, and I do think that AI is going to replace a lot of drudge work, a lot of things that will become more valuable are very human things and are things that um I see a future that we can move away from our screens and become more in touch with our bodies and ourselves. I see a future where the internet is so flooded with AI slop that more and more people choose to be present in the real, the actual. In fact, in face-to-face meetings and time spent around other people. And as the drudgery of white-collar office work becomes more and more automated in an endless tunnel of AI-generated emails and presentations made by robots for robots, I think there's going to be an increased value in human connection and interactions. My day job uh is working uh with Native American youth in public schools, and I love my job. And a lot of it is spent doing really fun activities. A typical week, I might take a group of kids hiking in nature or to play basketball or just be checking in with them on how they're doing. And but there's also a lot of like pretty unfund paperwork that I have to file and databases and programs that um, you know, I think that AI can do some of that drudgery in the future for my job and for a lot of people's jobs, and leave more human time, more time for like human-to-human, person-to-person connection. That's a viable future where we value and invest in and pay people who are good at what they do in person, where a premium gets put on the experiences that involve being in a shared physical space with other people and doing actual stuff in real life. And of course, this is also an aesthetic choice that humans must choose. It's something that we can lean into on an individual level. I mean, think about how the death of vinyl was declared long ago, but record stores are still popping up. I see a possible future for in-person therapists and social workers and teachers and acupuncturists and potters and poets and bakers and entertainers and somatic practitioners. And well, it all sounds a little bit hippie, perhaps, you know, and I mean that in the best possible way. I think that there's a future that is a bit more hippy-dippy and organic in like a pretty cool way, and you know, vinyl, and yeah, all the things that you can do in person with your hands in the sunlight, touching grass. And it may very well be a subculture, a counterculture, I don't know, offset from a version of the mainstream that is fully in the thrall of the digital, but it is an option, and it's an option that I think is actively worth choosing and moving towards. And there's no better time to start creating that version of the future that you want for yourself and others than today by getting more in touch with being in the body and in real life and off-screens. And so that's the future that I think we should all be striving towards. The future is human. That's today's show. I'm Anthony Alvarado. Thanks for listening to the rough draft. You can check out old episodes and previous recordings of the show on X Ray FM and also over at my website, Anthony Alvarado.net. Talk to you again soon.