Everyone on the air (and in print) this week seems to be making the argument that AI needs to slow down. I'd like to make a different one.
A (very) little about me: I was a tenured professor of engineering for a decade, then a licensed counselor with thirty years of practice, and now I’m an evolutionary psychology researcher and writer, so I’ve watched runaway systems from many angles.
My argument is that we've run the "we need to slow down" play before. In the 1980s, my father taught a course called "In the Shadow of the Bomb," only to watch the treaties he taught lapse one by one. More recently, we set climate targets, then drilled right past them. Slowing down is something our culture briefly visits, not something it does. The only way out of this conundrum is to change the culture, and, ironically, the very AI we fear is the first agent in 20,000 years capable of making that possible.
Listen… For most of the two million years our species has existed, we lived in small groups where our most important needs were met by proximity. We were seen because people had time to look at us, really look at us. We were safe because we belonged to each other. Somewhere in the last 20,000 years we drifted from that arrangement, and consumer culture came along with a substitute: “work harder and you’ll be recognized, acquire more and you’ll be secure.” Most of us know it isn't true, but we keep going because it is the only door we’ve been shown.
What no one in the current debate is saying is that AI created another door.
Imagine four hours a day of work alongside AI and the rest of the day open wide, spent with the people we love, doing things we chose together. The AI companies are already asking what people will do when the work is gone, and the answer is cultural renewal built on what we humans were born for: belonging.
This steps us out of a culture that insists on speed and keeps AI running at steroids and high-risk growth, and moves us into a culture that slows everything down, regulating us through real contact with each other. I know it might sound far fetched, but only three years ago, so did AI destroying the world.
What do you think? Honestly, if AI took most of your work tomorrow, would you be open to a lot more time spent in relationship?
[link] [comments]