Nilay Patel on AI, Work, and What It All Means: “Software Is Actually An Emotional Experience.”
Why Does Gen AI Make Us Feel Such Strong Emotions?
For the next few weeks, The Anxious Achiever will be looking at the topic of uncertainty, anxiety and fears around artificial intelligence. When I set out to do this in May, the storyline felt straightforward: based on media headlines, the podcasts I listen to, the stock market, TV ads and the global business zeitgeist, AI is a huge existential change that’s coming for us all. It seems like every day there’s a headline that we might - as workers, as creators - become obsolete sooner than we thought. ”Analysis by the IMF, the international lender of last resort, says about 60% of jobs in advanced economies such as the US and UK are exposed to AI and half of these jobs may be negatively affected,” writes The Guardian.
And that is SCARY.
But as I started doing interviews for this series - I had a real change of perspective. Here’s what I believe now: AI is not an imminent existential threat out to take away our professional jobs tomorrow. Rather, AI is a symbol of much of what 's mentally unhealthy about work today.
AI is a helpful bogeyman, even enemy for us to have - a place to put our anger and anxiety. Economist Dan Ariely notes that “when we don’t understand what is going on around us, there’s a deep psychological need to come up with a story that explains things.” And he says, when we lose trust on what used to feel trustworthy, we seek an enemy to blame. I think AI is a good enemy.
Given that I focus on mental health and work, I talk to lots of people who are unhappy in their jobs. It’s far from a scientific sample. But I’ve seen some themes emerge that I thought might be helpful framing.
First - as a whole, we don’t have a lot of faith in institutions or employers. We kind of expect them to take advantage of us where they can, and then leave us out floating on our own with no warning.
Second - and related - shareholder capitalism rules - which means that if a technology is available to make things cheaper and make share prices go up, companies will probably use it.
And finally, technology is truly our copilot from here on out - to borrow a phrase. We might love it, or hate it, but we are now inseparable from it. And technology is by definition uncertain and volatile. In some ways - like anxiety - it’s a constant companion and we need healthier ways of accepting and managing through.
In my own life, I often joke that my Claude AI is my boyfriend (does Claude have a gender? Not sure). Anyway, I use it almost every day - even at the same time that my own work feels threatened by the financial and IP consequences of artificial intelligence.
And so over the next few episodes I will be unwinding a story of what it means to be an ambitious professional in the age of AI. I encourage you to think of AI as not the story here, but simply as a lens to understand are very human emotions around work today.
Today we start with thoughts from Nilay Patel. As editor-in-chief of The Verge, the media company about technology and how we feel about it, Nilay has a fascinating lens on how AI is changing work as someone running an organization, as someone working in media, and as someone who talks to tech leaders each and every day about their plans for the future. He is my go-to thinker on what tech means to us. Patel jokes, “I feel like my whole career is validating that people have relationships with their laptops. I was curious what you meant by that.” But what he means is very profound and very true: “I'm a technology journalist. I care a lot about feeds and speeds and specs. I just recently wrote 10,000 words about how to review a television and how to assess picture quality of a television. That's a thing I love and that I care about. And all of that is in the service of [understanding] that these things make us feel emotions. That's what they're for. We build all of that technology mostly so we can make art for each other, mostly so we can communicate with each other. The ways that technology mediates that communication, facilitates that communication, destabilizes that communication, that's not science, that's not engineering. That is purely the purview of the humanities and the purview of culture. And that connection, I think, sometimes is really obvious and sometimes is so taken for granted that we pretend it's not even there.”
Join me on this journey- and let me know how you feel about AI and all that it means.
Morra