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 Aging™ group the issue of 'time'.
In my psychology studies, I latched onto Terror Management Theory that identifies humans' ability to be conscious of our mortality as the biblical "knowledge" that got us kicked out of Eden and banished to eternal suffering. This, of course, brings up the question of what propelled us beyond our fellow creatures to leave behind our blissful ignorance for a life, as Thomas Hobbes describes, "nasty, brutish, and short"?
Ernest Becker, in his book The Denial of Death, proposes that humans, being historically low on the food scale, were more prey than predator, and it was the most anxious among us who survived and passed on the pass key to not only survival, but dominance. It was our "mortality salience", our knowledge and fear of death drove us to the maniacal frenzy we live today.
"It is foolish to assume that the fear response of animals would have disappeared in such a weak and highly sensitive species. It is more reasonable to think that it was instead heightened, as some of the early Darwinians thought: early men who were most afraid were those who were most realistic about their situation in nature, and they passed on to their offspring a realism that had a high survival value."
It is our gift of neuroticism that drives us and is lacking in AI, which, as you describe, impotently searches the abyss for something to want or motivation. Our blessing and/or curse is our anxious fear of death provides us with an abundance of motivation. As Becker states, "we have become a hyperanxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even where there are none." Neurosis is our superpower...
"Our blessing and/or curse is our anxious fear of death provides us with an abundance of motivation." I like that: an abundance of motivation -- most of which will go unfulfilled, which is the struggle of living, I suppose.
“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?”
I love asking this question under the premise that AI already exists. So much of the discourse (or maybe just the early discourse) is “should we do this thing given all the risks?”—as if we were holding our own child in our arms and asking “do we really want to have a kid right now?” It’s done. The genie’s out of the bottle. We’ve made the baby. So a much better question becomes “how do we bear an appropriate amount of responsibility for this thing that we created?”. It’s a much harder question. But it also gives humans the agency we deserve, which we would be remiss to forget in all the doomscrolling.
On a side note, I recently watched Adolescence on Netflix which is an intense exploration of the “did we fuck up our kids?” anxiety that I’m sure keeps many parents up at night. It was a 5-star limited series in my opinion, and this essay made me think of it again in an interesting way.
Experiencing mortality is something that AI can never understand, which will inherently limit the creative capacity of AI. Part of being human is understanding that your life is finite and you have a narrow window of time to leave behind something beautiful, whether that's a painting, a novel, a family, ect. AI's immortality is, paradoxically, a limitation. In addition, I would say that another difference between human creativity and AI creativity is that AI is inherently derivative; everything it produces is based on scraping the Internet and repackaging what already exists into a new pastiche. I don't think we'll ever see AI produce a novel like Demon Copperfield or The Sympathizer.
This piece doesn’t feel viral in the way “Youth” did — people’s opinions on AI feel too calcified for that to be the case — but the opening was especially phenomenal. I loved seeing you set up the theme the death and time before realizing that this article was really in response to AI. I haven’t seen others frame AI and time in quite the same way. You’re such a good writer.
Thanks for the kind words! Very much appreciated. (I don't think anything I do will go viral like "Youth" did, but, like all those great artists before me -- Dexy's Midnight Runners, The Knack, Lou Bega -- I'm content to be a one-hit wonder.)
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 Aging™ group the issue of 'time'.
Hoping to hear from Jared. :)
In my psychology studies, I latched onto Terror Management Theory that identifies humans' ability to be conscious of our mortality as the biblical "knowledge" that got us kicked out of Eden and banished to eternal suffering. This, of course, brings up the question of what propelled us beyond our fellow creatures to leave behind our blissful ignorance for a life, as Thomas Hobbes describes, "nasty, brutish, and short"?
Ernest Becker, in his book The Denial of Death, proposes that humans, being historically low on the food scale, were more prey than predator, and it was the most anxious among us who survived and passed on the pass key to not only survival, but dominance. It was our "mortality salience", our knowledge and fear of death drove us to the maniacal frenzy we live today.
"It is foolish to assume that the fear response of animals would have disappeared in such a weak and highly sensitive species. It is more reasonable to think that it was instead heightened, as some of the early Darwinians thought: early men who were most afraid were those who were most realistic about their situation in nature, and they passed on to their offspring a realism that had a high survival value."
It is our gift of neuroticism that drives us and is lacking in AI, which, as you describe, impotently searches the abyss for something to want or motivation. Our blessing and/or curse is our anxious fear of death provides us with an abundance of motivation. As Becker states, "we have become a hyperanxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even where there are none." Neurosis is our superpower...
"Our blessing and/or curse is our anxious fear of death provides us with an abundance of motivation." I like that: an abundance of motivation -- most of which will go unfulfilled, which is the struggle of living, I suppose.
You keep outdoing yourself, Jared! I love that I could feel that I was in that tunnel of time, inside that room.
“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?”
I love asking this question under the premise that AI already exists. So much of the discourse (or maybe just the early discourse) is “should we do this thing given all the risks?”—as if we were holding our own child in our arms and asking “do we really want to have a kid right now?” It’s done. The genie’s out of the bottle. We’ve made the baby. So a much better question becomes “how do we bear an appropriate amount of responsibility for this thing that we created?”. It’s a much harder question. But it also gives humans the agency we deserve, which we would be remiss to forget in all the doomscrolling.
On a side note, I recently watched Adolescence on Netflix which is an intense exploration of the “did we fuck up our kids?” anxiety that I’m sure keeps many parents up at night. It was a 5-star limited series in my opinion, and this essay made me think of it again in an interesting way.
Experiencing mortality is something that AI can never understand, which will inherently limit the creative capacity of AI. Part of being human is understanding that your life is finite and you have a narrow window of time to leave behind something beautiful, whether that's a painting, a novel, a family, ect. AI's immortality is, paradoxically, a limitation. In addition, I would say that another difference between human creativity and AI creativity is that AI is inherently derivative; everything it produces is based on scraping the Internet and repackaging what already exists into a new pastiche. I don't think we'll ever see AI produce a novel like Demon Copperfield or The Sympathizer.
This piece doesn’t feel viral in the way “Youth” did — people’s opinions on AI feel too calcified for that to be the case — but the opening was especially phenomenal. I loved seeing you set up the theme the death and time before realizing that this article was really in response to AI. I haven’t seen others frame AI and time in quite the same way. You’re such a good writer.
Thanks for the kind words! Very much appreciated. (I don't think anything I do will go viral like "Youth" did, but, like all those great artists before me -- Dexy's Midnight Runners, The Knack, Lou Bega -- I'm content to be a one-hit wonder.)