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 an entirely different beast. Still, it is sublime when good and easy happen to overlap.

When food is easy, most people drift straight for it. Packaged snacks, drive-throughs, doordash, and so on. Our actions reveal that cost is no object. 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 stampede toward it. Sometimes we need only believe it is easier and suddenly our credit card is 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, the eases of dinners-to-our-doorstep, social media, smartphone gambling, stock market “investing”, and tinder offer us no immediate clues about what their real cost will be. It’s easier for us to lie back and be infinitely entertained than to give a shit’s-length thought about the direction our moment of ease has pulled us.

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

A Digital Button To Say We Just Did It

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 it shall just do it for me. This new button is about our own present 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 it to say “just did it”. No kidding.

Like every button worth tapping, this new button is backed by a machine. But its machine is about as far from a billion-dollar modern marvel as can be. It’s a relatively shitty machine but it’s our shitty machine and this is how we know who it’s working for. Ourselves.

“Hold on, wait a minute…”, you might be thinking. Why do the thing at all, let alone tap the button after? It may seem that at the moment of the tap, doing the thing was the harder option. 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 our machine won’t always be our easiest option, but it will always 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 from a choiceless freefall into oblivion.

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.

The Direction We Be Pulled

Today, every digital button we tap exerts a minuscule pulling force upon us. This force either pulls us toward AI (and away from humanity) or it pulls us away from AI (and toward humanity). However, the balance between these opposing pulls has been lost and, like the current of a river, the force is now unidirectional

In last few years we blithely blasted past a tipping point and so now every digital button we tap is a subtle tug toward AI. At this point, the idea of a digital interaction that pushes us toward humanity is nigh inconceivable. 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 felt this pull in both directions. Each person needs to feel for themselves the difference in the flesh. But to feel the difference, the alternative option must first exist, and rise to our attention, 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, because the two buttons produce opposing forces, we lack true choice. Up until the moment we 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”. It is a violation of our path of least resistance. When we find ourselves consistently “floating downstream”, compelled by our surroundings, not making choices. It’s comfortable but it comes at a cost beyond our control.

The one thing we must do is give ourselves 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.

Freedom is not guaranteed, but it is good. And it’s definitely not easy.