For all the enthusiasm and sense of new beginnings, I have to say it: artificial intelligence scares me. Not because I’m old school and demonise everything that smells like change. Quite the opposite — I’ve been right up close to every major tech shift for the past 30 years.
I’ve written about technological change, celebrated it, commented on it, and watched it critically. But most of the time I believed you can’t stop change anyway. And it’s no different with AI. But that’s exactly what frightens me — because it threatens so powerfully and so quickly across so many levels everything that should matter to us as humans.
After six months of intense engagement with AI, I can feel how deep the changes run. And I notice it’s stressing me out completely. There’s too much to learn, to understand, to practise. The machine takes so much off our hands and adds even more on top — so many possibilities to do things better. I can’t keep up.
Every day I wonder how to position myself as a writer. Whether to swim with the current or step sideways and do something completely different.
I’m certain that within a year, at least half of all web content will have been created at least partially with generative AI. There’ll be so much more content. Who’s going to read it all? Where does it lead? Does anyone still care about the handmade and the self-thought?
I only feel more confirmed in my path — moving away from pure content, towards people. Machines keep getting faster and better, but we humans don’t evolve that quickly. People need people. But the machines don’t need us. Meanwhile, we soon won’t be able to function without them. They won’t take over, but we’ll become ever more dependent.
Worse still: there’ll be no more surprises, and what makes life worth living fades. When we can get an answer to everything and all knowledge is available without the effort of searching, it collapses the tension between the unavailable and the available. It gets boring. We become lazier, more comfortable, more predictable, more programmable.
We’ll be lulled into a fog. Before long we’ll switch to autopilot, trust the machine, voluntarily hand over our brains. For nothing. We’ll stop questioning the output, stop thinking for ourselves. Just stop. We won’t be groping in the fog — we’ll freeze in the eternal ice of our own thoughts. And that scares me.