The future tense of the AI-pilled

Here are the opening paragraphs of my essay in the latest issue of The New Atlantis, “You Don’t Have to Use AI.” I’ve set in bold the relevant sentences I want to emphasize:

With the rise of AI, most people feel compelled to ask: How should I be using it? But this question assumes too much. We should instead be asking: Am I free not to?

The answer is simple: Yes, you are. If you would rather not use AI — if you don’t like it, if you don’t find it useful, if you just aren’t interested in adding it to your digital toolkit — then you are allowed to opt out. There is no imperative to use it. Whatever the eventual costs, it remains perfectly reasonable to hold off for now, perhaps forever.

If this sounds like heresy, that’s because it is. The line we’re being fed, week by week, day by day, is that generative artificial intelligence is comprehensive, transformative, and irresistible. It will touch every aspect of our lives, reshaping them from the inside out. Best, then, to hop on board the train now instead of waiting until it’s too late. God forbid you be left behind.

This type of narrative, sometimes sincere and sometimes propaganda, is perennial. It applies to politics as much as to technology. It says that, because history’s shape is determined by structural changes from the top down, we can know the future before it arrives. For this reason, technologists speak in the future tense. They don’t say “might” or “maybe” or “could,” only “will.” After all, they have visited the future bearing down on us and returned, like prophets, to declare its inevitable arrival.

The paradox, however, is that if the future is inevitable, then there’s nothing for you or me to do about it. Writing in the 1940s, C. S. Lewis observed a similar dynamic in communist writers. He noted that “they tend, when all else fails, to tell me that I ought to forward the revolution because ‘it is bound to come.’ One dissuaded me from my own position on the shockingly irrelevant ground that if I continued to hold it I should, in good time, be ‘mown down’ — argued, as a cancer might argue if it could talk, that he must be right because he could kill me.”

The true believers in the AI gospel make a mistake eerily similar to that of the mid-century communists: Because they suppose themselves on the right side of history — because they imagine history has sides at all — they cannot abide even mild dissent.

But you remain free to say no.

Here are some paragraphs from the middle of Tyler Cowen’s latest column for The Free Press, “You’ll Learn to Love AI Writing”:

Someday we will feel the same way about text generated with the assistance of AI. We won’t care much where it came from, and much of the time we will not even know. The AI-detection devices, such as Pangram, will no longer work because the AIs will, to the extent we want them to, write just like high-quality human wordsmiths. …

In this new world, books, articles, and Substack posts will appear on a regular basis, as they do today. For a while, people will be trying to sniff out how much AI contributed, using ever more sophisticated detection techniques. But eventually they will give up and simply judge content on its perceived merits. …

There will be so much content to go around, because the AIs can be as prolific as you want them to be. You might prompt the AI to produce writing for your own consumption, as I do already, or rely on AI search bots to find the essays you really care about, as I also do already. The process will be so drenched with AI that, eventually, you will surrender to the notion that the AIs did some of the writing as well. You won’t be able to tell the difference in any case, so you might as well sit back and enjoy what is being served up to you.

Thus spake the technologist: “You will surrender.” Is it a prophecy, a command, or a threat?