I Don't Apologize for Using AI
Can we stop pitting the past against the future with our polarizing ideologies? As a conservative, I feel compelled to romanticize the past and be wary of the future. It's a tiresome position to take, because there is so much good in our past and so much potential good in our future. Why not use the present to figure out how to wisely embrace both? The future of humanity should exhibit a practical blend of new technology and the natural, holistic solutions we discovered in our yesteryears.
Sagrada Familia in Barcelona and the art nouveau movement between 1890 and 1910 promote this constructive synthesis of the past and the future. They use new technology to take traditional paradigms to higher levels. Instead of using machines to build uninspired block structures, they use them to imitate nature. We all possess an innate desire to connect with nature, and that's why our modernist built environment feels so ... well ... unnatural. Modernism is divorced from nature.
This problem isn't just in architecture either. Today's common generic building designs are just a symptom of a deeper problem. We've built such an artificial environment for ourselves that we don't know our way back to nature, so it's not practical to just get back to it all at once. The common person, like me, doesn't have the skills to support themselves without the assistance of modern technologies. We've leaned so much into artificial solutions that I don't think we can get out of our unnatural predicament the way we got into it.
Instead, I think we need to push through to the other side and rediscover our love of creation by using technology to sub-create with God. What do I mean by that? I mean we should use technology to celebrate God's creation. Mastering prompt engineering, for example, has helped me write better prose to co-create beautiful scenes with AI image generators. We can also use it to learn how to work with nature. I know asking AI how to build a bushcraft hut isn't the same as building one, but for many of us it's a good way to start learning how to.
Economic Ramifications of AI
The economy has changed. A small farmer or business owner struggles to stay in business as they compete with national and international franchises. Many people have given up on owning their own business, and just started working for the big businesses they were competing with. This has led to a bottleneck: too many people competing for the same jobs, because big companies have made it too hard for those same people to make a profit doing the same thing in their own business.
Many people think the AI revolution is just going to make big businesses bigger, and leave the common person unemployed. That doesn't have to be the case. If we use AI properly, it doesn't have to lead to employers firing their employees. If we play our cards right, AI could help employees fire their bosses. If we use AI to do more, not less, we can create enough value individually to support ourselves.
We can flip the script. Business owners are thinking of how they can replace employees with AI (and robots). They figure, if they can use AI to do the work of even just one employee, the cost would be much cheaper because an AI bot costs less than just about any salary. But the same logic can work the other way around. If we use AI to produce as much as a business could produce, we won't need that business to give us a job.
Then, once our output matches that of a business, companies will be coming to us for our services and we will get to choose: Do we want the security that a company job gives or the freedom of working for ourselves. I've learned from experience that you usually can't have complete security and complete freedom simultaneously. Compromising to get more of one usually means sacrificing more of the other. But everyone should have the work flexibility to choose how much freedom and security they want, and we're reaching the point where the common person could have that flexibility some day soon.
New Level Reached
We need to use the technology of our age to build the future we want. There's no going back to some past golden age. We need to build our own version of a new golden age that synthesizes all of our nostalgia for yesterday with all of our hope for tomorrow. America was built on freedom. Then, late stage capitalism gave use secure, comfortable lifestyles that enticed us enough to abandon many of our freedoms. Now we are reaching a new level, a better balance between freedom and security.
That balance can begin virtually. For as long as I can remember, I've been a gamer. Some of my fondest memories as a kid are of my friends and I gathering around a TV, swapping controllers, taking turns playing Sonic and Mario. At the time, I thought I just liked the way the games let me play as someone with supernatural abilities in different, beautiful fantasy worlds.
But now I see, I was just longing for what this world could be. It wasn't even about wanting to escape to a fantasy world. It was more about just wanting the real world to be something else, something better. I wanted to build a better world for everyone. Those are very generic sentimental words, but this blog is designed to help people figure out how to do that practically.
So, I support the AI revolution. I don't think it should be unbridled, but I also don't want to see big companies and governments set all the guardrails. This is why the founding fathers of America emphasized the importance of religion. A strong relationship with God forms our consciences in a way that negates the need for intrusive government surveillance. It also inspires our imagination in a way that helps us see a path to individual independence.
Thus, you may have noticed that I use AI-generated images on this blog. I used to be uncomfortable using them, but did so anyway because there was no other way to express the thoughts in my blog posts. The stock images for my abstract ideas just don't exist. But with AI-image generation tools, my thoughts at least come one step closer to tangible reality.
Now I no longer apologize for using AI images. I'm not ashamed to admit that there have been days when ChatGPT's or Midjourney's visualizations of my ideas provided the inspiration I needed to keep pursuing them. A vision isn't supposed to stay inside our heads. If AI can help visualize it, then it can also help bring it to life. In this way, we can use technology to bring our nostalgia for the past into our hope for the future. There is value in writing about what is real, but the time has come to start talking more about what is possible.
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