A conscious decoupling

The more AI threatens to invade my life, both online and offline, the more I retreat.

I've noticed that the more AI creeps into everyday life, whether I can tell when watching a video or reading an article, the more I retreat from online life. That even goes for my life as a creator. I've noticed I haven't posted a video on my main YouTube channel for 48 days. That is unheard of for me, even though I've been taking a break.

The more relevant question is, why have I taken that break? It's easy for me to say that I got burned out or that I got overwhelmed with all the different types of optimisation that you have to do in order to lure viewers to watch for ever longer watch time. The more difficult question is what is happening to me such that this is no longer appealing at all?

And I think what I see in front of me is this headlong dive into AI and what it can do for productivity. Big tech trying to use data in order to further their own ends and profit margins, and me watching the diversity of material of interest and mediated experiences dominating not only what I see in the world around me, but my own personal life.

And I am railing against this. The only difference is that I have now become conscious about it.

One of the catalysts for this is me reading The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen, which is about as life-changing a book as I have read in the last decade. Not that it is perfect, but it certainly got my attention. And it will forever be associated with my wonderful experience listening to jaz and drinking coffee in a kissaten in Utsonomiya in Japan for 3 wonderful days.

And it really has called my awareness to how experiences in the world are now mediated through our devices more than ever. But this has been a slow creep up until this point. And my fear is that the current AI episode is accelerating this, certainly to the point where I have noticed it and I am pushing back.

The homogenisation of slop that I see in front of me is now becoming so ubiquitous for many people they won't be able to tell that it was any different at all from this in the past. And that worries me. I find myself retreating to handwritten journals, walking, and experiencing my senses firsthand rather than vicariously experiencing through travel logs and food logs.

I know, I do this myself though. I do post travel photos and Instagram my food. But I'm doing this much more consciously than I think I was in the past, and carefully sharing who this goes to.

At the moment, I'm focusing on my own body and my own health. I've managed to drop 19 kilograms since my peak weight and I'm now almost where I want to be in terms of a healthy weight, preparing for my life going forwards. But I've only been able to do this through focused concentration and time on my workouts, on my nutrition, and on walking. And that takes hours a day, which I might have spent doing other things online or focusing on how to understand AI and optimisation.

And I think that this is the big thing.

The opportunity cost of focusing on this stuff rather than the real world.
The opportunity cost that firms now realise that they have paid through increased use of AI tokens with no real increase in productivity.
The opportunity cost of sacking workers and now realising that you need a whole new layer of people to interpret the glop that has come out of low-level AI usage.

And the promise is that we'll just get better at AI prompting and this will get better in time.

I don't believe that's true. I think that this is a money-making additive behaviour scam that takes away from our time, and I think unless we take control of this at a structural level or at least an individual level, it will ruin us.