To carry on from yesterday's post, I think that AI is showing us more and more where the delta is between us and everything else in the world, and more and more about our own purpose.
I said yesterday that our purpose is partly to be industrious. A caveat: industry is good, but not for industry's sake. I'm not suggesting we create merely to create, for the sake of creating. AI can do that, and it can do it faster and better than we can. But there is a thing that AI can't create.
On the surface, this thing looks very similar to what AI already makes. It might even have the same general contours. But it's not the same, in the same way that an AI version of a person is not the same as a person.
More so, the things we create, that are truly human and not just humanity-as-a-machine-in-a-factory (which is how many humans have been used for millenia—labour and production power), they have a quality to them that mechanically produced things (even artwork, even essays, even conversations) don't.
They have a quality of relationship.
This quality of relationship has two dimensions in my estimation. First, there is the dimension of the self to the piece of work, and then the dimension of the self to the other. Every work of art tracks both downwards to the artist (relationship to self) and forwards to the viewer (relationship to others). There's no way to look at a statue by Bernini, for example, and not see both his exquisite dedication to producing something that was valuable to him and his way of seeing the world, whilst also wanting to produce something that would illuminate the world. True art is an act of charity, of chessed (a Hebrew word meaning something like 'loving-kindness') to the world.
AI can't do this, because art like this can't be computationally achieved. Yes, if you got a million monkeys in a room clacking away at a million typewriters (read: AI), you may get Darwin's Origin of Species, but that book would be meaningless in its entirety. It wouldn't have behind it the thousands and thousands of hours of travel and exploration; it wouldn't have behind it the loving intensity of Darwin's gaze, devoting his life to an exploration of an idea.
A work of art is meaningful in proportion to the amount of soul the author devoted to it.
The idea I'm circling sounds something like that. This doesn't mean effort, necessarily, but it does speak to the quality of relationship.
If we're considering, then, what meaning a human life might have—I think this may form part of the answer. Each of us are unique in the history of the universe. I don't mean this in a kitschy way—I mean that, mathematically, if you were to trace all the myriad decisions that led to you standing where you are now, with the influences (both of people and place) that have shaped you, and the compounding myriad decisions that have shaped all the things that have shaped you, and so on, outwards in an ever expanding arc of complexity—you quickly realise that there is no statistical chance of you happening again in the history of the universe.
Every breath you draw is unique, but more than that, you have an opportunity to look at, process, and be in relationship with the universe in a completely unique way. There is something you can give of yourself to the world it could never have gotten any other way. But not just anything, something the world needs, something of supreme value.
The thing to do is to be in relationship. To cultivate yourself so you may cultivate relationship with others. To shine your light as brightly as you may, to illuminate the path for others who walk with you. To care, deeply and profoundly, in a way only you can.
Yes, AI will replace the mechanical parts of our existence, and this will be a liberation. It will be a joy to lose the instrumentality that poisons and derails so many of our lives. In its place will be a void—a void of time, of attention, of focus. We can choose to fill this void with meaningless entertainment, numbing ourselves further, or we can choose to ask ourselves the fundamental question: "what can I give that no one else can? What do I care about more than anything else in the world? What is my soul drawn to? What lights me up?" When we find the thing that we can give to the world, where we will lovingly place every brushstroke just so, where we will pay attention to the minutiae because we care so so much—we will have found our purpose.