The To-Do List of Sisyphus

NB: Typically, I create these posts as the (omniscient, trusted, wry-but-sexy) voice of ZeroWidth, a kind of collectively wrangled, collaboratively generated result of much conversation and sometimes contention between myself and ZW co-founders John Cain and Pete Binggeser to arrive at a shared sense of the positions we wish to adopt/express for this newsletter. For THIS edition, however, I am writing as myself, as Ian, an (spotty-knowledged, unreliable narrator-ish) individual, since I’ll be drawing upon my own lived experience to make some of the points we wish to hit on.

Inciting Incident:

So this AI company spent a mess of money to hire Matthew Broderick to do a down-tempo version of his decades-ago Ferris Bueller character, spectacled and in a selected-by-committee-seeming unbuttoned denim shirt angled at Appearing Maximally Unthreatening. The company, Genspark, really seems to have taken a lean-into-it approach where Fears That AI Will Replace Us are concerned - rather than the more intuitive-seeming Adopt Reassuring Tone about the long timeline for such an outcome or the incremental nature of such things, they go full I’m-Rubber-You’re-Glue on the issue and seem to adopt a stance of “But really? Secretly? You WANT to get replaced, though.”

Resulting Reflections*:

On the one hand, Genspark’s counter-intuitive-seeming messaging approach would appear to cede conceptual territory to the Techno-Alarmists among us who’re convinced we’re like a month away from our machine enslavement that’ll be like a way less cool-looking Blade Runner dystopia where instead of neon and cinematic rain, everything’s just a drab, joy-suck strip mall, or it’s some dollar-store Matrix with zero martial arts but all of the ponderous philoso-jabber. On the other hand, though, they pick at one of the scabs covering one of the largely unspoken elements of the “the machines will replace us” narrative - namely that lots of the tasks that fill our workdays are onerous and boring and stultifying in their repetition, and every dang one of us would be thrilled to dang death to be rid of them. All the eye-roll parts of our jobs, all the meetings-that-coulda-been-an-emails and items we keep avoidance-pushing downward on our to-do lists, the things that really makes us feel like we’re by-god earning every dang nickel of that paycheck - surely these are the aspects of working life that AI was sent here to dispense with for us, no?

Personal History:

I was a disastrously poor student. If I had a nickel for every time I received the “so much potential” speech, I’d have like thirty bucks, easy. My trouble was not lack of intellectual chops or deficient curiosity, it was that I was born three quarters of the way to bored and if American schooling was a nation, its main export would be boredom. So in spite of some native smarts, I was a refusal machine calibrated to blockade my own academic success - my brain and temperament conspired to keep my participation minimal and my commentary venomous. So if I am nothing else, the cocktail** of my neuro-situation and my foul-ish mood state have always combined to make me a Canary in the Novelty-Seeking Coal Mine.

If you think I’m exaggerating, the quote in my senior yearbook*** was: Blow it off. On the face of it, this might appear to indicate a person averse to all effort of any kind. Which was never the case.**** What this (timeless, lofty) sentiment was directed at was not activity, per se, but activity that smacked of the purposeless, activity that felt like it did not matter in any substantive sense. So what all my refusal and resistance and insolence was reserved for was the Like most of us, I’m always grateful to feel fully, meaningfully engaged in my work, and where this is the case, I can and do put forth prodigious effort. But where I see my labor to be of the wheel-spinning variety, where it consists of repetitive look-busy pointlessness, where we’re promised a pair of curled and fading Post-It notes at the entrance of the Cubicle of Sisyphus, one reading “Push rock,” the other “Get liver pecked out,” and we just toggle back and forth between these till we’re made obsolete by robots, it is this level of activity at which the primal Blow it off in each of us must be directed.

So who knows, maybe the brain trust over in Genspark marketing has unwittingly unearthed a vital vein that runs through the AI Will Replace Us All narrative, a vein that inverts the underlying suppositions it rests on, namely that we must dread the approach of AI since it’s allegedly here to supplant and surpass all our capacities, to sub in for us in all arenas of (historically) human activity. And while, yes, the prospect of AI poetry displacing our handwrought verse, of AI auteurs crafting films that crowd out our own, ought to send a chill down our spines, the prospect of AI stepping in to fill the cells of our spreadsheets and schedule our meetings ought, it seems to me, to cause us to rise to our damn feet and greet it as our liberator. It’s this vein of the story that Genspark digs up - this I’m-not-lazy-but-ONE-more-bit-of-makework-nonsense-will-sap-my-will-to-live vein that exists in each of us to varying degrees.

Concloosh

Which is why these zeitgeist-y stories we’re fed on virtually any topic warrant lots more scrutiny than we might be inclined to give them. And listen, I get it - the AI Will Replace Us story is doused in exactly the type of outrage-kerosene that makes such stories flammable inside my mind. The vestiges of punk rock me, urging us all to be Blow it off, whatever it may turn out to be, coupled with the aging me, fed up with encroachments upon my life and mind and mood, seizures from my pocketbook and prospects and planet from all directions that have me Mad as Hell and Not Going to Take it Anymore, conspire to keep me riled up when such a story pierces the bubble of my fractured attention. But as is almost always the case, the kneejerk state of riled-upness is seldom the optimal one for assessing much of anything, and responses arising from such a state are likely to be pretty nuance-free.

So when you come at me with the AI Will Replace Us story, rather than letting my lizard brain take the wheel and cause me to be all umbrage-taking and doing a mess of pre-fight neck rolls to duke it out with imaginary robots (who like the Iron Giant would just crush me without breaking stride,) wouldn’t it make better sense to greet this story critically and with curiosity. Instead of running in circles Kermit-yelling my anxieties, wouldn’t it make better sense to ask follow-up questions? Like “How do you mean that?” and “Can it just swipe the stuff I’m fed up with already? Cuz I have a list handy.” Because it doesn’t take an Aging Ferris Bueller to recognize the utility and practicality of the well-placed Blow it off.

*I recognize, given the source and subject, that “Reflections” is a bit elevated for what’s going on here. But my weakness for alliteration is well-established, and “Stray Thoughts of Poor Quality” impedes the flow of the line, and runs the risk that you’d just skim over it entirely.

\\ More of a slurry, really.

\\\* The Goldbug, Amherst Regional, whose name is a mystery, since our team mascot was the Hurricanes. Which also made no sense, as we were a hundred miles from the Atlantic.

****In my 20s, I was co-founder of a storefront theatre company in Chicago. In all of human experience, there’s no endeavor more effortful than this. But hey, silver lining: it comes with an ironclad guarantee of zero material gain.