What the AI argument isn't asking

Everybody's talking about AI right now. At the dinner table, in the news, in the group chats.

Some of the loudest voices say it's coming for everything. Your job, your kids' jobs, maybe even what's true, and some days it even sounds like it's coming for humanity itself! Others say it's the biggest opportunity anyone alive has ever been handed, and you had better move on it now, because the window is closing fast.

And a lot of people, I suspect, are somewhere else entirely. Tired, mostly. Many are overwhelmed, watching everyone around them buy the next new tool, learn the next new skill, all while knowing there'll be another new one next month before they've had time to open this one.

I want to talk about AI for a few minutes, because it's where everybody's attention is. But for me it's the doorway, not the room. What I really want to talk about is something I see going on underneath it, in a lot of people I know, and certainly in myself.

Here's what I keep noticing, and you can tell me if it fits. A lot of the argument, from both ends, seems to assume the same thing. That the game is to get more and do more. One side is afraid you'll end up with less. The other is excited you'll end up with more. But isn't it kind of the same game?

In 1989 Stephen Covey quoted a line in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People that I've never been able to shake. It was Allen Raine's originally.

"You may get to the very top of the ladder, and then find it has not been leaning against the right wall."

Picture that for a second. Years of climbing, rung by rung. The degree, the job, the promotion, the house, the next house. Every rung a reasonable step. And then you get near the top, and you don't even recognize what the whole thing has been leaning on.

For years I took that line the way most people do. Pick the right wall and the climb will be worth it. Then my son read an early draft of this article and asked me a better question. What if the problem isn't the wall? What if it's the ladder? The whole idea that a life is something you climb?

I hadn't thought of that, and I think he's right. And a ladder isn't something any of us built on our own. It was handed to us, already standing, already leaning somewhere, with everybody around us climbing a ladder too.

Now here's Rich Schefren, who has been a mentor of mine for more than twenty years, wrote about AI this year. He says AI meets you exactly where you are, including the goals you've quietly shrunk over the years because of old disappointments, and then it helps you get there faster.

"But faster toward a default future only means arriving sooner at a place you never consciously chose."

Thirty-seven years between Covey's line and Schefren's, and it's more or less the same sentence. AI is an amplifier. Whatever ladder we're on, it will help us climb it faster. Which is wonderful, if climbing was ever the right idea.

None of this is new, by the way. Some very smart people have been asking versions of it for well over a hundred years. What's new is the speed.

So that's the question I want to put out there. Has anybody checked the wall? Or asked why we're all climbing in the first place?

Successful on the outside

I've observed that a lot of climbing produces a certain kind of person. Successful on the outside and a wreck underneath.

A couple of years ago I wrote a sentence trying to describe who I was really talking to, and it's still the truest one I've got:

I've created all of this. Done everything right. So why do I still hurt so much?

Maybe you know somebody like that. Maybe it's you. It certainly has been me.

Thoreau called it quiet desperation, in 1854. Schefren, this year, called it silent resignation. The dream gets smaller, and then smaller again, until you're no longer wondering how to change the world, only whether you can change yourself.

I'd add just this. It's quiet on the outside. It is not quiet where the person is standing. In there it's loud, it's screaming, and the quiet is the mask, the calm face we put on over an ache nobody else can see. It shows up as poor sleep, as the extra drink or the extra hour on the phone or in front of the screen, as a marriage that's gone a little cold without anybody deciding it should. That could be a little uncomfortable to hear or say out loud, but I think it needs saying.

The order we were handed

So how does somebody who did everything right end up there?

Here's my best answer. Most of us were handed the order for how our life is supposed to go, first this, then that, and we never noticed it was an order, the order:

HAVE, then DO, then BE.

Get the thing first. The money, the house, the title, the letters after your name. Once you HAVE enough, you'll be free to DO what you actually want to do. And BE? For a lot of us it never really comes up. Somewhere way out past all of that, maybe, we might finally stop and ask who we've turned into, and whether it's who we meant to be. Most days it isn't even in the picture. We think about what we'll have and what we'll do, and hardly ever about who we'll be, or who we've become.

It sounds reasonable. Obviously it's how nearly everything around us is set up, school and work and retirement planning and the rest of it. But look at where it leaves BEING. Behind a finish line that keeps moving back every time you get close, or missing from the equation altogether. It's all having and doing.

And the loop has a second gear, if you will, which is the part people miss. When more stops working, the loop doesn't stop. It just switches to better. Better car, better title, a better version of the same life. Still the loop, only with nicer language on it.

That's the ladder. Every rung is a HAVE or a DO, and each one felt like our own choice as we stepped onto it. What we never chose, and mostly never saw, is the ladder itself. Many of us were never even conscious of what wall it was leaning against, or if there was even a wall to begin with!

And here's the other thing about this ladder. It doesn't really have a top. Covey's ladder at least had one! This one just goes on and on, rung after rung, have, do, have, do, and we don't know what it's leaning on or where it goes. We just keep climbing, pretty much until we die.

And I want to be fair here. It isn't only a question of each of us picking a better wall on our own. A lot of this is simply how we've been told things are supposed to work. At work, in school, in our relationships, in the whole economy we live inside. We've been taught and trained in it since we were small, and no amount of personal effort changes that by itself. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But I do think it starts with seeing it, for one person or for a whole country.

And if the machine everybody's arguing about is mostly being pointed at this ladder, at getting more and doing more, then the fear and the excitement are both about how fast we climb. Faster up a ladder with no top is just more climbing. Very few people are asking whether we should be climbing at all.

Maybe that's some of what's under the fear about AI, too. Not the machine so much as the feeling that we were already climbing as fast as we can, and now somebody, or something, wants us to climb faster.

Before you decide

It's fall here as I write this. The days are getting shorter and I've noticed I'm a little slower getting out of bed some mornings. I've kind of decided that's OK. It's allowed.

So here's where I'd ask for your curiosity instead of your verdict.

If you recognize yourself anywhere in these paragraphs, the instinctive response could be to judge it... "I should be further along by now. I should be grateful. I should have figured this out years ago."

And the judgment might not only be about yourself. It might be about what you're reading... This is just philosophy. This isn't real life. This isn't how I was taught the world works. It makes me uncomfortable even thinking about it, so I'll just push it away.

Most of us know that voice. It gets up with us in the morning and starts the list before our feet hit the floor. And what I've noticed, in myself and in a lot of people I've sat across from, is that while it's talking nothing new gets in. The brakes are on.

I'm finding, slowly and a little at a time, that when someone just looks at it, with some curiosity, the grip on it eases up a little. The question stops being "what's wrong with me?" and turns into "huh, how did I get here?" And, in my opinion, that second question is a much more interesting place to stand, because it's one you can actually explore instead of one you have to defend.

So I'll leave you with one thing to try. It's an invitation, not homework.

Pause for a moment. Quiet your mind. Then think of one thing you've been waiting to have before you can finally be happy, content, relaxed, fulfilled. Write down the year you started waiting. Then ask yourself, gently: did I choose that, or was it handed to me?

There's no wrong answer. "I chose it" is a perfectly good one. Just notice what comes up when you pause and ask.

I don't have the answers for you, and I'm a little suspicious of anybody who says they do. It took me a long time to start asking these questions myself, and I'm certainly still at it. But I've come to think the ladder and what it's leaning on (or whether we should be climbing a ladder at all) is the most interesting question in this whole AI conversation. Hardly anybody is asking it yet, which I find kind of exciting, actually!

So picture it one more time. The ladder, the years of climbing, the wall it's leaning on.

What is your ladder leaning on, and where is it taking you? And did you ever actually decide to climb it?

And if the ladder was handed to you, the next question is, who handed it to you? That's where the next one picks up.