Artisanally authored by an imperfect flesh-and-blood human with hopes, dreams, needs, and even actual feelings.

Easy Is Not Good

Easy is not good; it is just easy. Good is entirely different (although it is sublime when good and easy happen to overlap).

When food is easy, most of us drift straight for it. Packaged snacks, drive-throughs, doordash, and so on. Cost is, apparently, no object to about 95% of us. Obesity rates, savings levels, and voluntary infertility tell this story plainly.

Left to our own devices, we toss goodness out the window in favor of ease. A new thing like AI need only be a tiny tick easier for us to suddenly stampede toward it. Sometimes we need only believe it is easier and we look down to see our credit card already flicking between our fingers.

Of course, credit cards are a classic example of easier than ever…but for a deferred cost. As with credit cards, with dinners-to-our-doorstep, social media, smartphone gambling, stock market “investing”, tinder, we have no clue what the real cost will be. It’s easier to lie back and be infinitely entertained than to give a shit’s-length thought about more than the moment.

However! Not all hope is necessarily lost. Nor is anything inevitable.

Let’s consider a different kind of button: the just did it button.

As in Did, not Do. As in I just did it for myself rather than you just do it for me. This new button is about our just-demonstrated agency. The old button is about the future agency of a machine. We get what we practice.

The way this new just did it button works is simple: first you take action and then you tap to say “just did it”. No kidding.

This new button is still backed by a machine, like every button worth tapping. But this machine is about as far from a billion-dollar modern marvel as can be. Sure, it’s relatively shitty machine, but it’s our shitty machine and that’s precisely why we know it works for us.

“Hold on, wait a minute…”, you might be thinking. Why do the thing at all, let alone tap the button after? It seems very much that doing the thing was the harder option at the moment of tap. But no, not necessarily: Not if we build our machine the right way.

Our opportunity space to make the “just did it” button work fantastically well (for ourselves) is friggin’ enormous. Seriously. But to see it, we’ll have to either think about it deeply or learn from someone who has.

Anyway, by definition and by design this just did it button is the equal and opposite of the “do it” button. First, because we say so; because we can say so. That’s a legal move, I looked it up. Second, because if our own friggin’ button does anything but good for us, we fix the machine! Duh. Because we can, because we made it ourselves. Fixing it won’t always be our easiest option, but it will be a good choice. Nothing matters more than our capacity to make true choices despite any and all opposition.

Our just did it button is equal to AI’s “just do it” button in the sense that it is also digital, and also a button, and you’ll probably see it in near proximity to an AI’s “do it” button. Why so close? To give you a second option, because its job is to set you free. Moreover, it is equal in that it exerts the same force as a “do it” button and in much the same way. The difference is the direction of the force: it pushes us toward humanity and away from AI.

Today, every digital button exerts a minuscule force upon you. This force either pulls you toward AI (and away from humanity) or it pushes you away from AI (and toward humanity). However, the balance between them has been lost and the force is now unidirectional, like the current of a river. In last few years we blithely blasted past a tipping point and so now every digital button we tap is yet another subtle tug toward AI. At this point, the idea of a digital interaction that pushes us toward humanity is nigh inconceiveable. With our opposing option having vanished, our “choice” of AI is being made on our behalf.

Anyway, we don’t know anything until we’ve experienced a pull in both directions. Everyone needs to feel the difference in the flesh. But to feel the difference, the alternative option must first exist and then be exercised. This is where our “just did it” button comes in.

Choice and freedom are tightly bound. Every true choice is an expression of freedom; every step toward freedom is a fresh choice. Most often, we make small choices, like our finger hovering between two buttons. We could tap either one, but which will we tap this time?

Until this choice is materially different — in that they two buttons produce opposing forces — we can actually make that choice and feel the difference between our options, we’re on a greased track travelling in a dark direction.

True choice is hard because it always involves “going against the grain”. When we find ourselves consistently “floating downstream”, we are not making choices. Rather, we are being compelled by our surroundings. Yes, it’s comfortable, but it comes at a cost beyond our control.

The one thing we must do is give ourselves — and more importantly, our children — a chance. Choice is not easy. Nonetheless, choice is the only way for us to first regain and then sustain our freedom. Freedom is a deliberate practice of choice after choice; it is not guaranteed.