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

The Other Side Of “Just Do It”

The AI companies have created a “just do it” button. When we tap this button, the AI just does it. It’s so easy. Prompt and tap, prompt and tap. It has no choice!

Unfortunately, the more often we tap — and the more work each tap “just does” — the more dependent on it we become. Our skills fade. The value of our curiousity declines. Gradually, with a lack of practice, our own capacity to choose erodes. It would be so human of us to miss all this as it happened.

But none of that is even new; excessive ease has always been a civilizational risk.

[The problem: unidirectional force / monoframing by/from AI & industry; not even noticing]

[The solution, in general]

[The solution, in specific]

What we need right now is a different kind of digital button, an easy-accessed way to generate an opposing force: toward humanity. And no, this isn’t yet another tech-bandaid layered over a tech-created problem. Why? Because it generates the opposing force we need; its effect is to push us away from all-tech-all-the-time and back within arms-length of our fellow humans

Although today’s AI is nearly the ultimate machine, we can do better. Not better in an engineering sense, but as an engine of better outcomes for us, according to us. Old and familiar philosophy has proven to be a poor fit for these interesting times. Without Fresh Philosophy, we’re hosed; we’ll keep stepping on rake after rake.

What I believe we’re all craving, even if we’re not able to articulate it, is new way to help ourselves get started in a sensible direction and then keep going. The gravitational pull of today’s tech is too powerful for artisanal humanity to resist.

To this end, I’ve published Eirdicht, a mostly-philosophical system of super-small intelligence. As in, almost stupidly small intelligence: barely enough to move the needle. Ego-shrivellingly small and simple. Why so small? So that to have a future, it must grow itself into it. Growth loves constraints and growth is the only way we’ll get from here to there.

Anyway, this post isn’t about Eirdicht exactly. Rather it is a high-level case for why something like Eirdicht is precisely what everyday people today need to counter the insidiously subtle demoralizing effect of the ever-present “easy button” being pressed upon us by Big AI.