It's been pretty interesting to see how the idea of friction (or struggle in this case) has been popping up in different places (specially in Substack) lately to argument against the use of AI.
I was kinda surprised when Mark Zuckerberg was asked about this topic recently. At first, he used an example that wasn't really illuminating (how most coding isn't done by hand anymore, so using AI isn't really hurting us). But then he said something more interesting - that sometimes struggle is necessary, but AI wouldn't get rid of it, just change it. How? He didn't explain this really
It's pretty obvious that there's this wish to control everything (to measure, compare, and turn things into metrics) that's expressed as a need for efficiency and cost reduction. And we're talking about ANY cost here - social, emotional, production, whatever.
But what I'm really wondering is how can we critique this mindset and actually do something to preserve this dimension of human experience? In this context, I mean, can we design AI (its interface, its goals, how it's deployed) in a way that keeps this dimension intact? Or is AI literally and unequivocally the opposite of struggle? And if that's the case, is de-digitalizing things the way to go?
Good questions Tomas! I surely don't think AI is the opposite of struggle but I see that some people think it may be. What I find hard and worth thinking about, is where do we want to draw the line. With "we" I mean both each of us individually and society at large.
As always, you leave us thinking once again: If men cannot fight for a just cause because that cause triumphed in a previous generation, then they will fight against the just cause. The point is to fight. Because we do not understand a life without resistance. And if technology makes it too easy for us, we get bored and rebel against it. But I believe it’s because inaction leads us to the tedium in which the meaninglessness of existence is revealed. Resuming a fight is about covering up that void, one that no technology will ultimately solve. At most, it will numb us to ignore it.
100% Javier. A very relevant question for the times we live in and difficult to answer. In the end I think everyone has to decide in which things they are willing to let life offer them friction and resistance and use those to grow.
Technology making things easier and taking away challenge is fundamental misunderstanding of how reality works, imagining some sort of finite amount of challenge or upper bound of challenge that we can reach. Rather technology allows the option of changing which challenges you want to tackle. You can always do things how they were done before, but now you can attempt things that couldn't have been done before. There are *more* challenges with every technology, not less.
You could make a (flawed) argument that some challenges are more worthy or important than others, that somehow simple, fundamental challenges are better than subtle more complicated ones, but again, challenges do not go away, people choose their challenges when they have the freedom to do so, and despite not choosing the challenges that would be ideal for them, and the importance of teachers and parents to guide those choices, it is folly to idealize a particular or consistent set of challenges.
Your argument ignores the fact that choosing a reasonably challenging life isn't independent from the actual degree of easiness you can access at a given point in time. That's why I put those examples in the last section. The guy with the morning routine is choosing a challenge, but that challenge is associated with the digital age.
It also ignores the fact that many people don't know a minimum degree of challenge is fundamental for a fulfilling life. People don't go on TikTok and spend hours and hours in there because they want but because, in the beginning, they don't know just how detrimental that addiction is going to be. And then they can't get out.
Except for that I agree with you. Technology doesn't erase challenges by itself. It's the culture and the customs around it that do - the existence of "nothingatall" doesn't force you to take it.
Culture is a sort of technology, or a set of technologies (institutions, etc) that afford certain practices, which in turn proscribe acceptable and unacceptable challenges.
Avoiding "content" addiction is certainly one of the big challenges right now and those that succeed will also hopefully succeed in changing the economic forces that created it.
Challenges can be out of favour or hidden - but that just creates a new challenge of countering that. Fundamentally no challenge can be erased, take hunger, it may seem trivial, but certainly not universally or permanently erased.
Not knowing that you need challenge for a fulfilling life is a problem - a challenge brought on by our culture dominated by advertising, that teaches that fulfillment must come from external sources so it can be bought. But requiring certain "hard" challenges for a fulfilling life is just as nonsensical. Advertising culture says the ultimate challenge is getting enough money but any culture that ranks challenges by some sort of worthiness or utility is making the same mistake.
Yeah, agreed. I never said we need certain hard challenges (e.g. to be really hungry from time to time). Just some. Of course, the last section is a philosophical experiment. That's the idea, to see what could happen (that, to some degree, I think it's happening in the West)
OK, we agree that we need challenges, but I read "some things shouldn't be easy" as prescriptive for what challenges are "hard"/valuable. "What you do isn't as valuable as what I do" (e.g. "real" art versus "AI art") may have some subjective reality in the current cultural context or for the individual (better to feed yourself than feed the addiction) but my guess is that attitude is counter to living a meaningful life or letting others lead theirs.
It just feels like "you didn't work as hard as I did" instead of "we all face the challenges of our times".
"Making art with AI by typing a prompt that copies some style is easier than learning to hone yours by hand, from scratch, over the years. But, as Dave says, it’s not necessarily better."
I believe it’s not about ease or difficulty but about the experience. We human beings learn from experiences, actually we are the sum total of our experiences. For example, if I’m learning to paint with oil colors, canvas, and a hand brush, I’m experiancing how layers of color interact, how ideas are translated into art step-by-step, and how effort and skill manifest into a tangible creation. This gradual process teaches me patience, discipline, and the value of incremental progress.
In contrast, if I create an artwork in the "oil painting style of an artist I admire" by using a prompt to define my idea and have AI generate the image, my learnings are about crafting precise prompts, reinforcing my choice of artists, and achieving instant gratification. The experience is fundamentally different. The visual output on a screen might look similar, but the human learning and experiences are completely different.
This is where the real challenge lies: industry and educators struggle to grasp the deeper layers of human cognition. We’re mistaking superficial visual similarities for actual creativity and learning, effectively comparing apples to oranges. As a result, we’re losing sight of what really matters—the transformative process behind creation.
There is always struggle. If you have ease in terms on material well-being, i.e. food, housing and safety, then there are still the people around you to grapple with in terms of getting and maintaining harmony. If you have a context where you master all of those, then you will still have to face your inner self.
The inner self is what we are here to master and then to use that mastered self to evolve ourselves.
On the one hand, if we needed a perfect life to know happiness (which is my placeholder here for Purpose), it might be an unknown, since too few of us ever have the perfect life. On the other, we are so used to trouble, the idea of ease is either frightening or so alien that it’s confusing. Ancient knowledge has said that happiness is a condition that we can have at any time, which is obvious, since there is no outer condition/context that can guarantee it. But trouble does have the benefit of motivating us and orientating us to working for it.
AI is just a tool. Its importance is for me clarified when one moves the centre of meaningfulness away from the materiality of the world. Any tool is a way to gain some power and ease. What is that ease for? Then the whole complexity of our effort to make AI commercial and make the big dividend starts to seem like a make-work program, and the utility of the tool gets unclear. Is it for making money or to do what it does? Or can do?
The whole mess is like a cancerous circular argument, multiplying its streams without purpose … until that clarity is reached.
I loved this. Your last section surfaced to my thoughts a long but relevant Dostoevsky quote:
“And, indeed, this is the odd thing that is continually happening: there are continually turning up in life moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity who make it their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as possible, to be, so to speak, a light to their neighbours simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this world. And yet we all know that those very people sooner or later have been false to themselves, playing some queer trick, often a most unseemly one. Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself--as though that were so necessary-- that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point!”
It kill us spiritually if not physically, and so I actually disagree: seeing AI wipe out perhaps all forms of art and humanity, I am pretty sure the Greeks would reject it. Indeed, the rejection of anti-humanity is a central part of literature.
Possibly. I don't consider that question because I think it's really hard to answer with a sufficient degree of grounding. However, I'd say they would have opposed suffering from war, even if for them it was second nature, almost a feature of the world they lived in
The Spartans who waged ritual war against their helots most likely did not oppose suffering from war, given that was clearly an example of a completely avoidable form of suffering.
Yeah, but wasn't their waging ritual wars a cultural consequence of not having better ways to approach a conflict? You can build your identity around suffering (some people do) but that doesn't take much from my point, which is that once you have technology that makes life easier AND you have the space to rebuild your identity somewhere else, you are better off for the most part.
Yeah. Not everyone creates their identity around the same stuff. We're children of history but also our specific circumstances. I'm not sure anyone today identifies mainly with being a warrior. Not even soldiers who've stepped on war grounds. Not even the fiercest of us. (Some want to believe they do but I'm sure in most cases it's just cope because they actually aren't warriors. And I don't think they could actually withstand living like Spartans did.)
It's been pretty interesting to see how the idea of friction (or struggle in this case) has been popping up in different places (specially in Substack) lately to argument against the use of AI.
I was kinda surprised when Mark Zuckerberg was asked about this topic recently. At first, he used an example that wasn't really illuminating (how most coding isn't done by hand anymore, so using AI isn't really hurting us). But then he said something more interesting - that sometimes struggle is necessary, but AI wouldn't get rid of it, just change it. How? He didn't explain this really
It's pretty obvious that there's this wish to control everything (to measure, compare, and turn things into metrics) that's expressed as a need for efficiency and cost reduction. And we're talking about ANY cost here - social, emotional, production, whatever.
But what I'm really wondering is how can we critique this mindset and actually do something to preserve this dimension of human experience? In this context, I mean, can we design AI (its interface, its goals, how it's deployed) in a way that keeps this dimension intact? Or is AI literally and unequivocally the opposite of struggle? And if that's the case, is de-digitalizing things the way to go?
Good questions Tomas! I surely don't think AI is the opposite of struggle but I see that some people think it may be. What I find hard and worth thinking about, is where do we want to draw the line. With "we" I mean both each of us individually and society at large.
As always, you leave us thinking once again: If men cannot fight for a just cause because that cause triumphed in a previous generation, then they will fight against the just cause. The point is to fight. Because we do not understand a life without resistance. And if technology makes it too easy for us, we get bored and rebel against it. But I believe it’s because inaction leads us to the tedium in which the meaninglessness of existence is revealed. Resuming a fight is about covering up that void, one that no technology will ultimately solve. At most, it will numb us to ignore it.
100% Javier. A very relevant question for the times we live in and difficult to answer. In the end I think everyone has to decide in which things they are willing to let life offer them friction and resistance and use those to grow.
Technology making things easier and taking away challenge is fundamental misunderstanding of how reality works, imagining some sort of finite amount of challenge or upper bound of challenge that we can reach. Rather technology allows the option of changing which challenges you want to tackle. You can always do things how they were done before, but now you can attempt things that couldn't have been done before. There are *more* challenges with every technology, not less.
You could make a (flawed) argument that some challenges are more worthy or important than others, that somehow simple, fundamental challenges are better than subtle more complicated ones, but again, challenges do not go away, people choose their challenges when they have the freedom to do so, and despite not choosing the challenges that would be ideal for them, and the importance of teachers and parents to guide those choices, it is folly to idealize a particular or consistent set of challenges.
Your argument ignores the fact that choosing a reasonably challenging life isn't independent from the actual degree of easiness you can access at a given point in time. That's why I put those examples in the last section. The guy with the morning routine is choosing a challenge, but that challenge is associated with the digital age.
It also ignores the fact that many people don't know a minimum degree of challenge is fundamental for a fulfilling life. People don't go on TikTok and spend hours and hours in there because they want but because, in the beginning, they don't know just how detrimental that addiction is going to be. And then they can't get out.
Except for that I agree with you. Technology doesn't erase challenges by itself. It's the culture and the customs around it that do - the existence of "nothingatall" doesn't force you to take it.
Culture is a sort of technology, or a set of technologies (institutions, etc) that afford certain practices, which in turn proscribe acceptable and unacceptable challenges.
Avoiding "content" addiction is certainly one of the big challenges right now and those that succeed will also hopefully succeed in changing the economic forces that created it.
Challenges can be out of favour or hidden - but that just creates a new challenge of countering that. Fundamentally no challenge can be erased, take hunger, it may seem trivial, but certainly not universally or permanently erased.
Not knowing that you need challenge for a fulfilling life is a problem - a challenge brought on by our culture dominated by advertising, that teaches that fulfillment must come from external sources so it can be bought. But requiring certain "hard" challenges for a fulfilling life is just as nonsensical. Advertising culture says the ultimate challenge is getting enough money but any culture that ranks challenges by some sort of worthiness or utility is making the same mistake.
Yeah, agreed. I never said we need certain hard challenges (e.g. to be really hungry from time to time). Just some. Of course, the last section is a philosophical experiment. That's the idea, to see what could happen (that, to some degree, I think it's happening in the West)
OK, we agree that we need challenges, but I read "some things shouldn't be easy" as prescriptive for what challenges are "hard"/valuable. "What you do isn't as valuable as what I do" (e.g. "real" art versus "AI art") may have some subjective reality in the current cultural context or for the individual (better to feed yourself than feed the addiction) but my guess is that attitude is counter to living a meaningful life or letting others lead theirs.
It just feels like "you didn't work as hard as I did" instead of "we all face the challenges of our times".
Have you read (otherwise you may be ready to read) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demian ?
"Making art with AI by typing a prompt that copies some style is easier than learning to hone yours by hand, from scratch, over the years. But, as Dave says, it’s not necessarily better."
I believe it’s not about ease or difficulty but about the experience. We human beings learn from experiences, actually we are the sum total of our experiences. For example, if I’m learning to paint with oil colors, canvas, and a hand brush, I’m experiancing how layers of color interact, how ideas are translated into art step-by-step, and how effort and skill manifest into a tangible creation. This gradual process teaches me patience, discipline, and the value of incremental progress.
In contrast, if I create an artwork in the "oil painting style of an artist I admire" by using a prompt to define my idea and have AI generate the image, my learnings are about crafting precise prompts, reinforcing my choice of artists, and achieving instant gratification. The experience is fundamentally different. The visual output on a screen might look similar, but the human learning and experiences are completely different.
This is where the real challenge lies: industry and educators struggle to grasp the deeper layers of human cognition. We’re mistaking superficial visual similarities for actual creativity and learning, effectively comparing apples to oranges. As a result, we’re losing sight of what really matters—the transformative process behind creation.
There is always struggle. If you have ease in terms on material well-being, i.e. food, housing and safety, then there are still the people around you to grapple with in terms of getting and maintaining harmony. If you have a context where you master all of those, then you will still have to face your inner self.
The inner self is what we are here to master and then to use that mastered self to evolve ourselves.
On the one hand, if we needed a perfect life to know happiness (which is my placeholder here for Purpose), it might be an unknown, since too few of us ever have the perfect life. On the other, we are so used to trouble, the idea of ease is either frightening or so alien that it’s confusing. Ancient knowledge has said that happiness is a condition that we can have at any time, which is obvious, since there is no outer condition/context that can guarantee it. But trouble does have the benefit of motivating us and orientating us to working for it.
AI is just a tool. Its importance is for me clarified when one moves the centre of meaningfulness away from the materiality of the world. Any tool is a way to gain some power and ease. What is that ease for? Then the whole complexity of our effort to make AI commercial and make the big dividend starts to seem like a make-work program, and the utility of the tool gets unclear. Is it for making money or to do what it does? Or can do?
The whole mess is like a cancerous circular argument, multiplying its streams without purpose … until that clarity is reached.
I loved this. Your last section surfaced to my thoughts a long but relevant Dostoevsky quote:
“And, indeed, this is the odd thing that is continually happening: there are continually turning up in life moral and rational persons, sages and lovers of humanity who make it their object to live all their lives as morally and rationally as possible, to be, so to speak, a light to their neighbours simply in order to show them that it is possible to live morally and rationally in this world. And yet we all know that those very people sooner or later have been false to themselves, playing some queer trick, often a most unseemly one. Now I ask you: what can be expected of man since he is a being endowed with strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he should have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes and busy himself with the continuation of his species, and even then out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man would play you some nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element. It is just his fantastic dreams, his vulgar folly that he will desire to retain, simply in order to prove to himself--as though that were so necessary-- that men still are men and not the keys of a piano, which the laws of nature threaten to control so completely that soon one will be able to desire nothing but by the calendar. And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky
It kill us spiritually if not physically, and so I actually disagree: seeing AI wipe out perhaps all forms of art and humanity, I am pretty sure the Greeks would reject it. Indeed, the rejection of anti-humanity is a central part of literature.
Possibly. I don't consider that question because I think it's really hard to answer with a sufficient degree of grounding. However, I'd say they would have opposed suffering from war, even if for them it was second nature, almost a feature of the world they lived in
The Spartans who waged ritual war against their helots most likely did not oppose suffering from war, given that was clearly an example of a completely avoidable form of suffering.
Yeah, but wasn't their waging ritual wars a cultural consequence of not having better ways to approach a conflict? You can build your identity around suffering (some people do) but that doesn't take much from my point, which is that once you have technology that makes life easier AND you have the space to rebuild your identity somewhere else, you are better off for the most part.
Given that no one else contemporary waged ritual war against slaves despite having the same technology?
Yeah. Not everyone creates their identity around the same stuff. We're children of history but also our specific circumstances. I'm not sure anyone today identifies mainly with being a warrior. Not even soldiers who've stepped on war grounds. Not even the fiercest of us. (Some want to believe they do but I'm sure in most cases it's just cope because they actually aren't warriors. And I don't think they could actually withstand living like Spartans did.)