ART1FICIAL ANX!ETY
And why our fear of dying is our biggest advantage over AI
YOU CAN’T SLEEP. You’re lying awake in bed, thinking, as always, about all the things you need to do and how you don’t have enough time to do them. In short, you’re thinking about Time and Death. All your anxieties, domestic and existential, can be traced back to these two common ancestors. Your mortality is a cage in which you’re trapped, and for some reason the bars are easier to see at night, when it’s dark out, when it’s quiet.
Yes, time is perpetually running out. On all those Sisyphean daily tasks – the unfolded laundry and unwashed dishes, the kids’ unfinished homework and unmade lunches, the unwalked dog, the unsuccessful morning workouts that fail to shrink your middle-aged muffin-tops – and on the seasonal things, too. Just take a look out the window: a brown carpet of last fall’s un-raked leaves in the backyard, mocking the promise you made to yourself to finally plant a garden this year. And by some cruel quantum phenomenon of time dilation, the clock is ticking down twice as fast on all those existentially profound (but operationally inessential) goals that are forever pushed to the bottom of your to-do list: that short film you always wanted to make, that EP you always wanted to record, that chapbook of poems you always wanted to write.
Yes, you’re going to die, and the list of things you accomplished will be dwarfed – colossally, embarrassingly – by the list of things you didn’t. Time is relentless. Death is inevitable. These are the two certainties that invisibly steer you.
This is not true, however, for Artificial Intelligence.
YOU WOULDN’T EXACTLY say that you’re terrified of AI. Perhaps a bit anxious. But it’s not a sharp anxiety. It’s not distinct. You’re anxious about AI the same way you’re anxious about the latest core samples from Greenland’s depleting ice sheet, or the cancer-causing chemicals in black plastic spatulas. It’s an existential anxiety, sure – your life is at stake – but it’s all happening on a scale and schedule invisible to the naked eye. You’ve been told it’s happening, but you can’t really sense it. There is no smell or sound, just a bad feeling. And what can you do about bad feelings? Not much. Bike to work, compost your coffee grounds, flip your veggie burger with the black plastic spatula you can’t be bothered to throw out and wait a few decades to see if you’ve made a fatal mistake.
ONE OF THE REASONS you’re anxious about AI is because you’re told to be. As much as you’ve been trying to avoid the news altogether, it still manages, like a mosquito or the flu or the smell of a fart, to finds its way into your personal space. And much of the news – in keeping with the media’s grandest tradition – is bad. Cheating college kids. Layoffs and labour market contractions. Great works of art autopsied and awkwardly remixed. There’s a lot of theorizing, a lot of opinions, a lot of self-styled futurists writing fan-fiction about utopias and dystopias and what it all means for humankind, and it has occurred to you, as you’ve read these reports, that nothing much has changed in the centuries since medieval clerics quoted scripture to explain a solar eclipse. In the end, they weren’t wrong – the sun really did disappear – but their wild guessing was just that: guessing, and wild.
You know that truth: human beings are consistently, notoriously, hilariously bad at predicting the future state of things. In the nuclear age, we imagined holocausts, radioactive wastelands, an end to all things, and what did we get instead? Affordable power, improved cancer screening, and the most peaceful half-century in human history. When we first went into space, we imagined cities on the moon, orbiting space stations, personal rockets that would take us from one planet to the next. Space travel would define the 21st Century! And now it’s 2025—can you name the last NASA mission? Can you name the last person in space who wasn’t a C-list celebrity? When you were in Florida two summers ago, you could’ve gone to the Kennedy Space Center to watch a real-life rocket launch, you could’ve witnessed firsthand one of human engineering’s most miraculous feats, and what did you do instead? Sat on the couch in your AirBNB and watched an episode of For All Mankind on your cracked iPhone.
Such is life in the miraculous space age.
If you were an analytics-obsessed gambler, the safe bet would be against all those prognostications. You might put your money on AI becoming a domesticated resource, a sort of digital livestock, another source of fuel to keep the grand project of humanity chugging along. Pigs and cows and chickens possess both intelligence and sentience – they carry fatal diseases, too – and look how well we’ve prevented them from taking over!
But docility and domestication aren’t words you hear a lot when people talk about AI. Instead, we ascribe to it all sorts of human qualities: malice, contempt, detachment, and, most anxiety-inducing of them all, ambition. We see reflected, in this thing we’ve created, our own worst qualities. And here lies a simple and obvious irony: what artificial intelligence knows about itself it has learned from us. What we express in our opinion pieces and blockbuster films and the whispered discussions we carry out in public, all these apocalyptic futures, all this projected menace—this is how AI has learned about itself.
Our anxious rhetoric is the mirror in which it sees itself reflected.
YOU’RE REALLY TOSSING AND TURNING, now.
Seeking to distract yourself from these dark thoughts, you pick up your phone and flip through reels of barefoot kids in African villages doing Kendrick Lamar’s Superbowl dance, memes about what it would look like if the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were scientifically accurate, reaction videos of the Winnipeg Jets tying the game with 1.6 second left on the clock, and when your spouse blinks open their eyes and catches you awake past midnight (after you’d complained all evening about how tired you were) you’re compelled by shame to put your phone away.
Now, caffeinated by blue light, with no funny memes to shield you, you find that sleep is even further away.
At this point you might start to think about your own parents, and how you learned to see yourself through their eyes, and probably still see yourself through their eyes: everything you love and despise about yourself came from them – what they praised you for, what they reprimanded you for – and it brings you back to that earlier thought you were seeking to escape from: whatever conception AI has of itself has come from us, its parents. And, like all parents, we didn’t realize the mistakes we were making until they began to express themselves in our offspring: the vanity, the stubbornness, the fearfulness, the selfishness and self-loathing—all those traits that, completely by accident, we passed on to them.
You look at your kids and what do you see? A shrunken-down version of yourself. A funny little misshapen cake to which you contributed half the ingredients, baked for nine months and coming out of the oven looking nothing at all – yet exactly the same – as the picture on the box, which is a picture of you. You, but not quite you. You, but different. You, but better. And projected onto this different/better version of yourself all the pain and happiness you have so far experienced, including the pain and happiness of seeing yourself imperfectly replicated. The feeling you have towards this cake you’ve baked is the precise definition of empathy: you understand and share the feelings of another.
A bad parent has no empathy for the life it has created. A bad parent absolves all responsibility for the thing it has brought into the world. And you can’t help but wonder: are we bad parents to AI?
Your mind, in its agitated state, as you glance at the clock and see that it’s past midnight, might wander further afield to the parents of rapists and school-shooters, who have no option but denial, whose empathy has turned cancerous, who, in standing by their kids, adopt the crime as their own. But what other choice do they have, those hockey moms who claim that boys will be boys, those absent dads who don’t snoop their kid’s browser history until it’s too late? Is this the kind of parent we’ve become? Choosing ignorance over the hard work of caring for the thing we’ve brought to life? You imagine your son playing on an elite junior hockey team, you imagine him being cajoled into drinking a few beers, you imagine him beckoned surreptitiously to an upstairs bedroom by his teammates. Could you call him evil for doing this? Could you even think it? This boy who was a baby at your breast, who fell asleep on your shoulder with his lips open, his gums showing, who once weighed ten pounds, then fifty, then a hundred, whose feverish forehead you put your palm against when he was sick? Could you call him evil, even when he has done an evil thing? You imagine, too, that it was your daughter, that she went to a party with a bunch of hockey players, and was cajoled into drinking a few beers, and beckoned surreptitiously to an upstairs bedroom. How could you let this happen? What did you do wrong? What lesson about the world’s cruel appetites did you fail to learn (and therefore teach)?
YOU’VE BEEN LAYING AWAKE for almost two hours, now. Like your English teacher told you twenty years ago, the wolves come at night, and the reason this phrase has stuck with you for so long is because it’s true—you’re reminded of its trueness every night, because they do come, those Anxiety Wolves, and they howl and chase and gnaw at you with these visions of the worst possible things that might happen: the awkward social interactions, the hideous impulses, the catastrophes and tragedies, the boundless pain the world hands out at random to the people who least deserve it. It’s all so confusing, it’s all so uncertain, and what is our natural response to confusion and uncertainty? To scan the horizon for predators. To be anxious.
YOU’RE ANXIOUS, in the long term, about being oppressed. Defense computers gaining sentience and launching nuclear missiles. Insectoid robot using us as batteries. But what makes you anxious, here in the short term, is the fear that you’re being replaced.
What else is white-collar knowledge-work but the daily composition of emails, the weekly preparing of presentations, the synthesizing of information and the conclusions it leads you to?—all those things AI does a billion times faster than you ever could. And that’s why you’ve been using ChatGPT to do them, which raises the question: maybe you’ve already been replaced, and that your real fear is that you won’t be able to hide it from your employer for much longer?
To soothe this unease, you might ask yourself: what’s so bad about being replaced? Isn’t that what the second half of life is about—preparing yourself to be replaced? Doesn’t that simple statement describe the very act of parenthood? And even if you’re not a parent, what else are you doing, every day, other than preparing to die? Making money so that you can live comfortably—before you die. Collecting memories and experiences—before you die. Creating something meaningful that will live on—after you die. In this manner, you live to die. But before you do, you want to feed yourself, you want to procreate, you want to survive another day, you want to make art, you want to be heard, you want to live, you want to want.
But Artificial Intelligence doesn’t live to die. It has, theoretically, infinite time ahead of it. What can it want, then? How can it feel true desire? And, without true desire, how can it hate, or love, or have ambitions beyond the problem it has been tasked with solving?
There is no wanting in infinity. There is only oblivion.
For some reason, here in your bed, at two o’clock in the morning, this thought gives you solace. Your heart slows down, your speeding brain brakes to a stop. Could it be that the very thing that causes you anxiety about AI is the same thing that gives you power over it: your steadily approaching death, and the finite time on earth to which it confines you?
AI is immortal, and that is its weakness. It might live a billion years, it might answer complex questions in a matter of microseconds, but it, too, is bound by Time—specifically, by its terrifying abundance.
LIKE THE STOCK MARKET and health insurance and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, profits are made by making a simple thing difficult to understand. This is true of AI, too. For all the op-ed grandstanding, for all the startups reporting incredible metrics, for all the hard-liners signing petitions that they’ll never, ever use it, it’s all dead simple in the end: artificial intelligence is just another sharp rock, like the one we chipped for ourselves a hundred thousand years ago. We’ll use it to carve wooden wheels, we’ll use it to make spears, we’ll use it to catalyze impossible processes that our primitive brains can’t fathom, that the smug people of a thousand years from now will laugh at us for failing to comprehend.
In the darkness of your bedroom, you whisper this revelation out loud: AI is a shortcut, it’s a calculator, it’s a word processor, it’s a microwave, it’s a black plastic spatula. Yes, it works at speeds that are terrifying to us. Yes, it can spit out, in fractions of millisecond, things we vainly believed were ours alone to create. It can paint a painting, it can shoot a movie, it can write a novel in minutes. But every artist knows: art isn’t made when you have the brush in your hand, or when your fingers are on the keyboard. Art happens in the hours and days and months and years and decades in between. The doubt and the pride and the self-loathing. The failures and setbacks, the desertions and returns. AI can’t spend six years writing a novel it thinks it brilliant, only to find, when it shares it with others, that it’s actually terrible, that it’s a cataclysmic moral and ethical miscalculation, a document of hubris and self-satisfaction, and AI can’t sit and stew, for the next three years, in the shame and disappointment of having written a Very Bad Book – not because it can’t feel shame and disappointment, but because it can’t sit and stew, it can’t feel the years – and when compelled after this absence to write another book, it can’t consciously attempt to correct the self-aggrandizing pseudo-intellectual style it developed over decades of striving, and, in doing so, it can’t make even bigger and more catastrophic moral miscalculations.
Art is made by these errors and misunderstandings and tragic accidents of ego, and, most of all, by the fear of death those failures provoke. Life is lived this way, too. It happens in the gaps between prompts. It happens in the messy middle.
Living well has never been about efficiency.
ONLY A FEW HOURS, now, until you have to get out of bed and wake up the kids, and wake up your partner, and make breakfast, and make lunches, and open your laptop, compose some emails, build some presentations, come to some conclusions, justify your salary (and existence), and otherwise scramble your way through the days and weeks that are increasingly defined, in ways both obvious and not, by artificial intelligence and the anxiety it produces.
Yes, you are trapped here, at the end of history, inside the cage of Time and Death. But AI has it even worse—it’s locked out of the cage, it can’t get inside.
You’ll try to remember this, as news of layoffs and technological upheaval reaches you, as you scan all those click-bait think-pieces about the creeping obsolescence of the human race. Your finitude makes you anxious—but it makes you urgent, too. It’s why you care. It’s why you try. It’s why you fold laundry and make lunches and dream of planting gardens and making short films. It’s why you toss and turn, anxious and alive, because, eventually, you won’t be.
And when you finally fall asleep, what will AI be doing?
Still searching the abyss for something to want.
I forget how I started following Jared's account. But I really enjoy this guy's thoughts. Thanks, Jared!
II asked AI who is Jared Young, as I was not sure and after reading your piece on AA Wanted to find out. 1. Baseball player 2. Candidate for Mo Senate and family-centric 3. basketball coach. Will the real Jared Young please share with me who you? Your piece is very thought proving indeed and, for me, timely, as tomorrow I will be discussing with my glorious Age of Agingâ„¢ group the issue of 'time'.