Tuesday last week, I went to a community discussion about “AI + Humanity in Practice” at Rebel Rebel, a local lounge/music space/community venue.
My single biggest takeaway, which I really want to share with my peers, is just how powerful it is to go into a room without my work hat on. The act of listening just as a neighbor, not as a professional, not as someone who owes anything but neighborliness to these people, was really mind expanding in a number of ways.
And I say that as someone who works very hard to be a good listener, and if I can manage not to tear my rotator cuff patting myself on the back, I’m pretty successful most of the time. But listening is inherently relational, and so there are always slices of attention going to relational issues like “what is really needed here” and “do I need to act on that” or “who else might need to be in this conversation.”
All those voices could be quiet for 90 minutes when the answer was always “no.” It was profoundly peaceful to know that no one was going to ask me for anything, and I didn’t owe anyone anything, other than my respectful presence in the conversation.
And so that’s the thing I want to recommend most – sit in rooms where your expertise is frankly, not important.
A couple specific takeaways:
I don’t talk to enough small business owners, so I learned a lot listening to people for whom AI is making their business more sustainable. For a salaryman like me, it’s reasonable not to trust that the bosses have your human interests at heart when they talk about efficiency gains. For a solo proprietor, this is a very different equation – one neighbor said that having an “AI intern” was the difference between the business being her main job and having to get a 9 to 5 and run her business as a side hustle.
The ecological concerns hit differently when people are explicitly connecting Big Tech to their own family experiences of Big Coal. Eastern Kentucky is still dealing with the ramifications of the last industry to come in, use up the land and water, and ship the power and money out of the area. The discussion about natural resources use often feels like an abstraction to me; listening to direct stories is a good antidote to that. (It also resonates with a good video by Hank Green which addresses the complexity of talking about AI water use and specifically local context.)
I’ve enjoyed listening to my son’s opinions about AI, but again, it was informative to listen to young people whom I don’t owe parenting to. And quite frankly, it was frightening to hear their hopelessness. The folks who spoke see AI as a short-term patch on an economic system that has no room for them. And I offer them empathy, but it was useful to recognize that giving them my fatherly response would actually be inappropriate.
This all leads me to another big takeaway: I think many of our conversations about AI reveal deeper structural issues. I’m wondering how much the narratives of both embracing and rejecting AI are about symptoms and not causes. When, in the same room and the same hour, business owners say “I can’t do this on my own” and young people say “I’ll never have a job”, I can’t help but wonder why we’re talking about automation and not social safety nets, business regulations and employee taxes, education and social spaces. In the same way, as much as it’s vital that we talk about data centers in the specific context of local watersheds and land use and electricity access, I can’t buy the apparent argument that what we’re currently doing is OK.
I don’t have a way out of that. The issues around AI adoption or resistance are real and need communities to talk about them. But I think I can say that the all-AI-all-the-time discourse, and the attendant drive to pick a side and crystallize, isn’t it. Maybe talking to someone you don’t usually talk to is the way out of that particular box.
Image Credit: taken from https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/The_People_in_Your_Neighborhood. It’s kind of sad to me that Sesame Street doesn’t seem to be doing much with this classic sketch anymore.
