Move Fast and Break People

the wreckage that AI has wrought and the case for humanity

The new human gaze. Photo by Eugene Zhyvchik on Unsplash

If you’ve read my previous work here, you know I have been trying to make friends with AI for some time. I keep thinking that if I just read one more perspective, I’ll finally get it. I’ve read many almost-compelling ones, like the one about the merits of replacing workers to free them up for “other things.” (Does no one remember what happened when manufacturing left urban centers?) I’ve tried to understand its use case in our current “epidemic of loneliness.” (Leave it to billionaire tech nerds to think that more tech is the solution to a tech-induced problem. Someone get them into a knitting circle.) Open-source AI and fediverse social media sound democratic, but neither addresses key concerns about the tech itself.

The rationalizations grab at myopic straws that show little understanding of how social dynamics (other than consumer influence) and the human spirit actually work. The long con points to a primrose path lined with influencers hocking Kool-Aid and face fillers, so we especially don’t notice when our souls have been sucked and our gazes slant permanently downward.

What I’m actually looking for is the explanation of AI that shows there are any benefits for the average user that don’t further alienate us from ourselves and our fellow humans. The one that shows us that, ultimately, AI can be a connector, not a divider. The one that shows AI can value objective truth over algorithmic persuasion. (It can’t. Ask Grok.) The one that allows humans to maintain personal agency and trust in each other’s essential goodness. Such hope is folly when the people pushing AI are the richest people in the world with very few social skills themselves and vested interests in manipulating truth. Hubris and greed are also innately human and more lucrative.

In such moments of despair, I try to take a longer view. Where does this put us as a species? What does it say for humanity, as a 300K-year success story of evolution and problem solving? Is AI just a natural iteration of the network effect in which our big brains and growing population need to farm out huge parts of the human experience in order to keep surviving? Nope. That doesn’t sound quite right. People are more complex and more resilient than interchangeable cogs.

No matter what angle I try to view it from, the outlook for humanity is still bleak in a world of AI. Not because it can’t handle procedural tedium and multi-level thought faster than most humans. Not because its applications for human use are probably endless and often revolutionary. But because, if wielded for the wrong reasons by the wrong people, the potential for it to go horribly wrong far outweighs the potential for it to be a human panacea. (Case in point: DOGE. But also, Xanthorax.)

Authors of dystopian fiction have been predicting this for years. The G-rated version is Wall-E in real time. AI is the new toy of the wealthy and powerful, to wield for their own amusement to the detriment of the many. We are rats in the maze and they are laughing at us.

As the tech-du-jour, AI presents a key question that has plagued all technological advancement throughout history. That is, “We can, but should we?” It is the moral and ethical dilemma that often gets shelved while we congratulate ourselves on the bigness of our brains and the depth of our investment portfolios. “Sentient” tech sits right up there with cloned humans and designer fetuses. Reluctant to participate in such discussions, the broligarchs of our current era salivate over a perfection of daily life that would rewrite the code for what it actually means to be human, and discount huge swaths of the global population.

In 2009, “move fast and break things” became the Silicon Valley shorthand for future innovation. “Breaking things,” by definition, meant iterating ideas fast and dealing with consequences maybe never. Sixteen years later, Harvard Business professors Frances Frei and Anne Morriss characterized it this way: “The assumption embedded in this style of operating… is that we can either make progress or take care of people, one or the other. A certain amount of wreckage is the price we have to pay for creating the future.”

We are currently witnessing that wreckage. People have lost by convincing themselves they’ve won on a slow drip. “Progress” has blurred the lines between human and technological agency faster than we can track. Our capacity for basic communication has devolved into minimal effort with minimal characters, so that we now rely on AI to craft it. A whole generation fears face-to-face interaction but embraces one-directional online personas, so that being into a void, instead of being in community, is the new social standard. Disruption has become synonymous with ease, life hacks, and skirting meaningful labor, while deepfakes and talking heads spoon-feed us feel-good personal ideologies. We feel smart, we feel righteous, we feel relevant — but are we?

In an age of tech that claims it knows us better than we know ourselves (as a feature not a bug), we have crossed a threshold past which humans have little value outside of being economic drivers. We are the commodities themselves. We are clicks and followers and data sets, to be manipulated without forethought for a few powerful people’s status and wealth metrics. To them, we are the keepers of vast amounts of historic and current knowledge to be farmed, traded, exported, and driven to obsolescence. We are the genuine article, on which the facsimile is to be mapped, only to be relegated to the scrap heap. We are less and less the stewards of our planet and more its oppressors — blissed-out on the surface, but lonely underneath, feeding this misery with more hits from the promised solution while it sucks the planet dry.

Ultimately, our use of AI demands we establish which parts of our humanity we truly value. Do we have enough consciousness and agency left to preserve what makes us most human? Do we have the guts to work for it? To say NO when a billionaire puts forth the next great thing that steals a slightly bigger part of us? To divorce ourselves from our current vices? Or has AI already made us too complacent to notice?

Sure, AI can probably Door Dash soup for a sick neighbor. But it can’t have genuine emotional exchange with that neighbor to let them know they are not alone in a difficult time. It cannot feel fulfilled by a job well done. It cannot bear witness to the birth of a new life. It cannot be buoyed by shared experience and common cause. It cannot grieve the loss of a loved one or speak up against injustice. But it is insatiable. It will indifferently devour any human function we choose to forego in the name of convenience. (And it will charge us for the privilege.)

In assuming ease and efficiency as primary, AI negates the very best characteristics of our species that have helped us succeed for this long. It creates a future devoid of belonging, inquiry, community, resistance, and collective self-determination. It is a devaluing of culture, tradition, work, and empathy. We forfeit our better natures and indenture ourselves to greedy, soulless masters when we put agency and morality in the hands of tech. We could be our own undoing yet.

Sounds pretty grim. But there is still time. One need only look to last week’s news cycle to glimpse the parts of humanity that AI cannot fathom:

Habemus papam: Tens of thousands of people gathered in St. Peter’s Square in Rome, on May 8, and millions more watched online to witness the naming of a new head of the Catholic Church. It was the 267th such event over a 2000 year history. People from all over the globe came together to signal their belief in one person as a symbol of hope for the Church and the world, despite the chronic problems of human foible that plague that same institution. In Pope Leo XIV, people are looking for a better human future. This level of tradition is not something AI could ever invent or replicate. It requires a soul and a desire to see ourselves in other beings to feel alive.

Black Dandyism: The 77th Met Gala happened on May 5, celebrating the history of excellence in Black men’s fashion with the theme, “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.” While the event itself was a showcase of finely-dressed celebrities in their own interpretations of the theme, the history of Black fashion is not just about good looks and sharp tailoring. Black Dandyism is an ongoing cultural movement that arose in post-Emancipation America to restore dignity, identity, and self-determination to former slaves and free Blacks through fashion. The spirit of Black Dandyism as a form of resistance fueled the Reconstruction Era, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Black Power Movement. The Met Gala shows that it is alive and well in 21st century fashion and culture. This persistence of collective identity and agency requires shared experience and empathy that AI will never satisfy.

Work and Democracy: As much as major news media is beginning to gloss over it, the fallout from staff cuts to government agencies is still being felt nationwide. Just last week, major cuts were made to the workforces of the FDA, the CDC, the NIH, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid, and the Department of Education. They represent a fraction of the estimated 250,000 jobs that have been eliminated in the name of “efficiency” in the last five months. More importantly, these are all agencies whose work is to care for other humans. In fact, democracy itself is a social construct that has existed for millennia as a tool for helping humans mutually thrive. Let’s be real. Government servants are not in it for the money. They are in it because they have dedicated their lives to making our government work for the American people. Fulfilling work in service of others is part of the human experience. Yes, there are a lot of us. Yes, bureaucracy can get bogged down and frustrating. But when the well-being of an entire nation is at stake, thinking that the work of humans can be replaced by big data and AI is not advancement or efficiency. It is destruction of vital connection to life and society, and elimination of accountability, in service of a few people’s grift.

I will likely never make friends with AI. I grimace every time I hear a friend has used it as a proxy for human interaction. We are selling our souls for a few moments of perceived ease instead of doing the real work of relationship, scary as that is. Maybe that makes me a troglodyte, or just old enough to get away with rejecting the new. But I would rather my kids and future generations be connected to a million flawed humans through joyful, sorrowful, frustrating, beautiful mess than alone with convenience any day.

Have a great weekend.

-IWW