Normal Human Female

Imagine you had a teleportation device that could take you anywhere instantly. No need to walk, drive, or take public transport – just teleport. How would that affect your life? Of course, you would get more done, faster. You would be able to satisfy any urge to go anywhere at any time. You would not be spending precious time and energy on the in-between of transit. But what of the cost? 

Perhaps you would forget the route to get from A to B. You would not discover new things along the way – that new coffee shop, park, or a beautiful mural. You might lose some muscle tone and cardiovascular health from lack of walking. You would lose that mental buffer of in-between time where you let your thoughts wander, listen to music, and maybe even daydream. And lastly, after becoming fully dependent on your teleportation device, you may lose all patience in waiting for a destination, becoming accustomated to an instantaneous arrival. 

The modern era has been an ever escalating charge toward convenience. Enlightenment and the scientific method has unleashed centuries of problem solving to make life infinitely better than that of our ancestors. Clean water, education and access to information, vaccines and medicine, abundant food, abundant consumable products, travel, the internet, entertainment, on and on – we all enjoy the outcomes of our era of technology and innovation, that much is clear.  

But with all this progress, we should be asking of ourselves, what are we progressing to? 

With most technology, something is gained and something is lost. With most technology, the something gained is far greater than the something lost. To use “machines” as a general example – usually the something lost is the element of human-powered work, and the physical and mental benefits that brings. Human-powered work may be washing clothes manually or chopping wood to heat a home. The something gained is the better results of a machine – cleaner clothes and more consistently heated home – as well as the time that can be used for other tasks.  

4 paragraphs deep, this is where I reveal that (sorry) this writing is actually about AI and the story of technology, convenience, and the inconvenience of life. Machines have automated much of the standard work of life that our ancestors spent several hours each day performing: cleaning, cooking, sewing and mending clothes, growing food, tending to animals. Modern life entails specialized work in exchange for money that we use to purchase machines or products that replace much of this standard work. Now we are at the dawn of an era where specialized work is automated as well.  

There is plenty of writing that frames this transition as part of a natural progression in the advancement of technology, and dismissing concerns with comparisons to the introduction of the car, microchip, or internet. In each, something is gained, and something is lost. Now for AI, we arrive at the last kind of work free from machine automation – a fortress, the most valuable, the most singular, that holds our ultimate humanity and our ability to reason, to dream, to awe, to revere, to mourn, to experience, to feel, and have unleashed a mental teleportation device. 

No longer do you need to think! The Claude or Gemini or Grok overlords are there to take that off your hands and hand-deliver you to a destination. Maybe you could have gotten there on your own, but now you’ve saved so much time! You can get so much more done! And you MUST because everyone else has the same mental teleportation device, so you need to keep up, you don’t want to be like the people in the 2000s who couldn’t figure out the internet, right? It’s the same thing. . . right? 

What connects AI to all of technology is the narrative that discomfort, wasted time, and boredom are problems to be solved through productivity and consumption. With the dawn of AI we’ve arrived at the final destination of this narrative, where we are meant to cede all mental discomfort for the benefit of productivity and consumption. But this comes at a far greater cost than ceding the discomfort of chopping wood. If you could distill a human down to a single quality, it would be how their mind works. This is the core of how one makes decisions, forms relationships, treats people, reacts to setbacks, solves problems.  Everything that we are can be summarized by the contents and workings of our minds, and these patterns are built through discomfort, trial and error, and boredom. Everything that we are is lost, little by little, when we cede what is good for our minds, to what is good for capitalism and productivity. They are not one and the same.  

So now the cat is out of the bag and there is no returning to a pre-AI world. Simply acknowledging what can be lost if we throw ourselves headlong into AI is the first step. Acknowledging that discomfort, wasted time, and boredom are critical parts of life – all of life, mental and physical – and we should not fall so far into the trap of technology, where the final destination is existing as a thoughtless vessel for productivity and consumption. Learn a hard skill. Try something and fail. Reclaim boredom. Reclaim your mind, and fiercely protect it. There may be cases where teleporting is indeed incredibly useful, but don’t lose sight of what is lost when you forgo the journey. The journey is not a means, it is life itself.