Where to start?
We start with you. Is there anything in your life you stopped doing because there was no way to make money doing it?
Letting capitalism come between us and the things we love is common in society today. Loved ones often discourage students from pursuing professions that “have no money in them.” Further demands on our time slowly strip away hobbies, passions, social life, and more. Though hidden, AI introduces an additional wedge between us and the things we love. To help identify the hidden wedge, we start with self reflection.
Personal Value vs. Monetary Value
Capitalists attempt to simplify decisions by asking, “How much and how long?” Despite this being a common practice in society, not everything should have a price tag. Personal intrinsic value rarely matches the actual cost. For example, $10,000 to save my dog would be a tough decision, despite my dog being important to me. Or the fact that there is no amount of money I could get paid to stop learning. I can’t say definitively if the system ever intended to connect intrinsic value with cost, but it happened in part because service workers need to earn a living as well.
AI compounds the issue by enabling the production of compelling and seemingly creative content faster than humans. The cheap cost and speed of delivery feel like a dream come true to the trained capitalist. This speed of production, paired with human’s self doubt and self criticism creates a problem for the individual’s perception of intrinsic personal value. Said differently, AI creates a compelling means of underselling one’s own abilities and contributions.
Where capitalism has been a questionable guiding star already, with AI it seems humanity would benefit from a new guiding star. One that helps separate intrinsic value from monetary value. The guiding star needs to replace the question, “Will this make money?” with “What will I continue to do regardless of monetary value?”
Locating your guiding star
Around 10 years ago I unknowingly discovered a new guiding star. Creativity.
Embarrassment and fear stopped my creative journey in 2nd grade. The belief was there is a logic and creative side to the brain, and you existed in one or the other, not both. Ironically, I didn’t feel like I was in either as religious views clashed with logic, making logic difficult. This made life really confusing. Regardless, I made it through high school with reasonable grades.
Physics always intrigued me but I couldn’t take the class because I lacked the math prerequisites. I signed up for the class anyway and lucked out because the teacher stopped instruction halfway through the year and told us war stories instead. Knowing what I know now I would have failed the course had he continued.
Graduation eventually came around, and I was glad to be done with math. At the time, getting a math degree felt impossible, even absurd to consider. When I got to college 3 years later, I had to choose a major. Not knowing what I liked, I turned to my grades for guidance. Compared to other subjects, I did best in mathematics. So, it surprisingly seemed like the highest chance of success. Though challenging, I got through it.
Looking back at age 30, I recalled my pre-college mindset that a mathematics degree was something I could never achieve. This got me thinking: what else have I stopped myself from doing because I was told or believed it was not for me?
Drawing.
Intrigued that I had proved my younger self wrong about math, I setup a personal experiment. The goal was to prove I could not learn to draw. My math background helped me setup a few parameters. The experiment needed to run long enough to remove all doubt, and there needed to be a decent amount of effort to overcome my loud inner critic.
After collecting some data about my schedule, I realized I spent about 3-4 hours a night streaming shows. To maintain consistency, I drew for 45 minutes before watching shows and established a routine. Experiment length was important as too short might leave doubt of the results. I settled on drawing for 45 minutes every day for one full year (365 days). Expectations were as low as I could make them.
Over the year, I kept every scribble and ever line I drew, nothing was thrown out. About 2 months in, I realized that learning to draw was possible. Placing the images next to one another made it easy to determine progress. Line work was becoming clearer, shading helped establish 3D shapes, and I was learning terms like negative space. Books helped give guidance on where to go next and built terminology for searching for online tutorials.
This was a life-changing experiment and drastically changed my perspective. I turned to other areas of my life where capitalism discouraged exploration.
Another example is once I graduated from high school, I stopped playing video games because there was no way to make money from it. It took a few years of exploring the subject again for me to discover how much I undervalued the activity’s contributions to my life. Playing video games is relaxing and helps me process at the end of a tough day. Like a charging station, it helps re-energize and reset.
Watching movies can inspire me to act on hopes and dreams and even prompt new ambitions. Drawing, even poorly, provides a means of self-discovery. Writing helps me express myself in ways that illustrations cannot. Creating music helps provide humbling experiences to keep me grounded in reality—it’s also fun. These help me connect with myself and others. Making money wasn’t the goal for any of them. I do them because I love them.
The evidence in my life was overwhelming. Capitalism’s guiding question of, “Will this eventually make money?” distracted from the greater value of the activity. Capitalism has blurred the deeper meaning of the word value. Value can mean something deeper than how much it costs. There are things of inherent value that deserve our focus, regardless of any potential financial gain. They exist.
Despite the developments in AI, I will continue doing the things I love purely for personal satisfaction. They are part of what makes me who I am today. It’s part of my identity. I am an artist, writer, mathematician, musician, father, husband, animal caregiver, botanist, and so much more. Referring to them as job titles overlooks the ample benefits they provide. All of them are serving as my guiding stars, giving me purpose beyond monetary value. In the emerging world of AI it is becoming clear to me how much the world needs a similar adjustment.
Self reflection questions:
If money weren’t a thing, what would you be doing today? (Not if you had all the money, but if money didn’t exist.)
The response hints at what you value. Next, dig a little deeper. If someone never told you to stop, what might you still be doing?
AI and Potential Loss of Self
With AI being used for decisions, let’s discuss how it could go wrong with a personal example. Though the example is not AI usage specifically, it has enough parallels to offer some guidance. The intention is not to invoke fear, but to offer insights into ways AI could misguide.
My Personal Identity Crisis
For the first 30 years of my life, I was part of a religious organization. That organization heavily influenced decisions I made. Influenced is too soft a term, though at the time I wouldn’t have admitted it. They made the choices, but let me think I did. I willingly complied, thinking it was a type of shield. Something that prevented me from making poor decisions. What I thought it was helping turned out to be a way of offloading deeper, critical thinking.
When something challenging happened in life, I would turn to the organization and God for help in figuring out what to do. Often, the organization had teachings that clearly defined what to do. When the teachings didn’t clearly spell it out, they would encourage me to speak with God directly. Trusting that he would tell me what to do. No one was encouraging me to figure it out on my own without God or the teachings of the church. This meant from a young age, I wasn’t making my own choices. The problems developed early on, but didn’t manifest until I was an adult.
Offloading decisions to others, especially life changing ones, has a major effect on our human brain. Psychology studies these effects, and therapy can help us sort through them. My willingness to let others choose for me eventually caught up with me. There are 2 major reasons I bring this up in a discussion about AI. First, mindlessly following orders. Second, loss of personal identity.
The organization encouraged me to listen to their guidance regardless of my personal feelings on the matter. They claimed their teachings surpassed modern education and any ideas I might have on my own. The impact on my personal self was to distrust my mind. Which in turn made me terrifyingly devout with an intense sense of duty. The church’s teachings had consumed me fully. I would say and do what they wanted, regardless of my hesitation. Anytime I pushed back, I would feel guilt and shame, which caused me to seek further guidance from the church on how to adjust.
Not trusting oneself to make important decisions incurs a heavy tax. There was no way for me to discover right vs wrong on my own. They had an answer to every question. They dismissed the things I criticized, claiming they had no bearing on this existence. This system didn’t allow for self-discovery. It slowly ate away at my personal identity until the church had completely consumed who I was. The church saw this as a good thing. They encouraged me to lose myself more and more. I lost my personal identity, who I was, and why I cared about anything. Including my life. It left me depressed and in a dark time.
Leaders, friends, and family within the organization saw me as happy, willing to help, service oriented and a good person. No one knew how much I was struggling on the inside.
Eventually, I recognized the issues with handing off decisions, and I sought therapy to help me understand how to get my life back. It was a tough phase, and I’m still grappling with concepts, though I could have spared myself considerable difficulty had I not delegated choices to a supposedly all-knowing god.
How does this relate to the AI discussion?
My case is not unique to me. Therapy is full of people experiencing religious abuse similar to my situation. As more people turn to AI for advice, it is highly probable that we will see an increase in therapy cases. The problem is slow moving and can take a long time to identify.
The easiest way to avoid loss of self is to not turn to AI for advice. If that doesn’t feel like an option for you, refrain from asking for its opinion. Instead, use it to help with critical thinking. Ask it to present multiple perspectives. Relationship advice specifically can face hurdles because people commonly favor their own perspective. Leverage the tool to help find relevant content. Ask it to present arguments for and against and verify every piece of information it presents to you with a reliable human source. Do not blindly trust the output—ever.
Pay close attention to thoughts like: “AI is smarter than me.” Or, “I trust AI more than I trust myself.” These are hinting at a deeper problem forming. Loss of personal identity is a loss of trust in oneself. This is an early warning to not use AI for advice. Seek guidance from multiple sources and a professional therapist when necessary. Part of what made it difficult for me to recognize I was in a dangerous place is that I would only seek guidance within the church. Though I’d often consult external resources while in the church, I found myself less prone to accepting or testing their recommendations. Personal bias can make this difficult to recognize, heavily favoring a single source on our own. Talk to another human being before proceeding with AI recommendations.
AI opinions are algorithm based
AI doesn’t form opinions like humans do. It builds opinions off statistical weights and terms that are passed to it through programming. Humans build opinions from personal likes and dislikes and general experience with the thing. Do not confuse the two.
Summary
With AI potentially making tough decisions for us, it could lead to a personal identity crisis, as religion did for me. Equally concerning is that offloading decisions in the way AI allows enables mindless following. To use AI responsibly, we need to have more confidence in and healthy relationship with ourselves.
Currently, we do not have enough scientific data to know how AI will impact our brains. To remain safe, wait for the data before seeking guidance from AI.
Above all, remember you are accountable for the decisions you make, not AI.
The Self Critic
The race to AGI includes a goal to produce autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work. This goal dramatically undersells human capacity in two significant ways. First, the idea of outperforming humans. Second, economic value.
Outperforming Humans
The idiom “We are our own worst critics” captures why the AGI goal is troubling. To outperform implies that we can measure. Where GPUs have benchmarks, humans do not have an equivalence. Yes, we can track statistics about the individual, but as it stands today there is no human benchmark to compare against. The issue compounds with AI’s speed in producing something reasonable. Where humans, especially beginners, are likely to say, “Eh, it’s better than I could do.” There is a misleading element in the evaluation: the harsh critic of self.
AI is a predictive algorithm. It does not have insecurities, vulnerabilities, uncertainty, or even survival instincts, but humans do. The phrase “better than I could do” is a statement that stems from insecurity. It is the harsh critic silently working in the background. AI does not have a harsh critic. AI doesn’t need to prove itself like humans do. That gives AI a significant advantage.
This critic shows up in places like creating art, learning, cooking, sports, and any human activity. The speed at which AI produces content makes it easy to suggest it’s better because it seems faster. Not only do we get to skip the decade or more to perfecting a craft, but results are available within seconds. This speed is not something humans can compete with. The issue is that without doing more rigorous study suggesting it is better is inaccurate. Especially because of the harsh inner critic humans have to deal with.
The critic provides humanity with a downplaying effect that is not currently included in AI’s work. The harm of this downplaying effect is difficult to measure and even harder to prove. Because individuals can only evaluate the concept within themselves. To truly evaluate AI’s capacity would require AI to evaluate itself. Not a simulated evaluation, but truly allow the inner critic to cause AI to justify choices and argue for decisions made. Humans are more capable than current AI studies suggest.
How to measure more accurately?
To start, challenge the harsh self critic. Is the work really better? Have you dedicated 30 years of your life to become an expert? If the answer is no, there is more work to do before you can definitively say, “better than I could do.”
Anyone trying to work with AI needs a clear view of their own capabilities. Tossing it up to, “It’s better than I could do,” is misleading and arguably untrue. Similarly, reducing human cognitive ability to that of a machine seems inhumane and equally misleading.
To help fight this problem, we need every human AI user to be more honest in their personal assessment of self. Broadly speaking, this requires humanity to level up. Self-awareness is a fundamental concept in the emerging world of AI. We cannot truly assess AI’s output until we clearly understand what separates ourselves from the machine.
Economic Value Vs. Human Value
Beginners and intermediates are the most likely to underestimate their own contributions. Experts struggle with underestimating, too. This is partially because capitalism has blurred the lines between personal value and monetary value as discussed previously.
Value is a personal concept. Regardless of AI’s capabilities, humans have value. This value is not something that economic standards can fully measure. To help see human contributions more clearly, we need to improve our ability to question our harsh inner critic.
The messaging is that AI will eventually outperform humans is monetarily driven, not intrinsically driven. To remain safe as we leverage AI tools, we need to be aware of these differences.
Summary
As we integrate with AI, we must remain aware of our thoughts, mainly because AI’s development is being driven by economic value rather than personal value. This is a degrading metric and has a great potential of harming the human self. Confusing the two can have a negative impact on mental health. This means we need to be gentle and honest when evaluating our own work. AI may replace monetary value, but it will struggle to replace human value.
Part One Summary
To summarize this section, I think when to use AI is a personal decision; as such, it requires self reflection. What works for me might not work for you. That’s ok. I’m encouraging you to explore on your own, just keep in touch with your own personal thoughts. If the AI interaction ever feels scary or concerning, put down the device and seek help from a human.
Remember to be nice to yourself, and you can do incredible things. Humans were doing amazing things long before AI ever showed up. Trust in yourself. Believe in yourself. You’ve got this!