Overview: Skills for Navigating AI

Part 1: Skills that'll help you navigate AI

This blog is for communicating about AI to artists, because I felt a particular connection with the art community, and wanted to try to help them process the AI situation better. (I’m 39, the first half of my life was centered in the art world, with a degree in filmmaking and animation. But, I’ve since joined the world of “professionally think about the dangers of AI and make sure it goes well.”)

In addition to “help artists process and understand”, it also seemed good to help, you know, everyone else. And, probably, the things I had to say to artists would probably also make sense to other people.

I have a lot of things to say. Each thing I want to say is, ultimately, just one sentence. It’s just that many of those sentences are confusing and overwhelming and will either make you go “What? No, I don’t believe you.” or “What? No! If that’s how it is man I just don’t know what I’m even supposed to do.”

So, each sentence will hopefully end up a blogpost, to give more context/evidence, and to help convey how I handle all of this psychologically and practically.

But there’s a lot to cover, and it seemed good to start by giving a sort of table-of-contents of what sort of stuff I plan to write.

The High Level

AI is coming, it’s a big deal, and we (humanity) are not ready to handle it.

• There are not going to be silver bullets for navigating the automation / job loss that’s coming. You will probably need to retrain, multiple times.

• AI companies are literally trying to make AI that’s better than every human at every job. If they succeed, by default it would be very bad.

“Orienting”, “grieving”, and “strategizing”, will be important skills for navigating AI.

• There’s also a particular kind of positive, practical attitude I have towards navigating the enormity of the AI challenge, I want to try to convey.

It’s possible to at least roughly predict where AI is going, longterm.

• I have my guesses, which I’ll get into.

• It’s probably worth trying seriously to form your own guesses, and update them as you learn more information.

We’re facing one of the greatest challenges/changes to the human condition, and I think great art will be an important piece of how we navigate it.

• The most important such art will be art that grapples with the AI endgame, over the next couple decades – not just the next few years worth of struggles.

• Also, humanity could really use a positive vision of what the future should look like. And it seems like great art must be part of that as well

Part I: Skills You’ll Need

There’s not going to be a silver bullet or simple instructions for navigating AI. What I think you need is some ways of flexible of handling however the situation shakes out. I don’t know which jobs are getting automated next, or what new jobs will come into existence. I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen to art.

Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, by Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1842

Orienting and Grieving as skills

It feels irresponsible for me to get into “where is AI going?” before focusing first on “how is one supposed to orient to something so huge?”.

By “orient” I mean “take new information seriously, integrating it into your decisionmaking.”

AI will keep automating new jobs, and keep disrupting society. There will never be a “normal” you get to settle into. I think it’s more sustainable to find a way of living where “re-orienting” doesn’t feel like such a big deal, like a natural part of life.

I think of “grieving” as a special case of orienting. Grieving is the process of learning that something very important to you is gone, or maybe never existed.

There will be a lot to grieve, with AI: The career you wanted to have, the life you expected to live, the very idea that things will someday settle down into “normal.”

Orienting is a skill. You can get better at it, on purpose.

Grieving is a skill. You can get better at it, on purpose.

Some subskills of orienting:

• Noticing when new information might be important.

• Looking at the implications of new information – where does this probably lead, a few years down the road?

• Handling “emotional whiplash”.

  • It feels disorienting for your plans to suddenly get disrupted.

  • You can learn to adjust your expectations, such that part of planning is “knowing things might get disrupted”, and that re-orienting is just a normal part of life.

• Being willing to actually change your plans.

Some subskills of grieving:

• Noticing when you are clingingly attached to something in an unhelpful way.

• Feeling around in your soul until you find the exact True Name of the thing that has been lost. Often people need to grieve oddly specific, subtle things. It’s easier to do that if you can name them.

• Developing a sense of when to let something go, vs fight for it.

• “Pre-grieving” something that you’re not sure if you want to let go of, but, you can tell that your clingingness is making it harder to think. Do the first few steps of processing that maybe you might need to let it go. Then think clearly about whatever seems true and right.

• Using ritual and community to help you grieve big things, together. There should more types of funerals for more things, IMO.

Strategizing as a skill

We spend most of our time on autopilot. Autopilot works pretty well. But it doesn’t work well when your world is getting disrupted.

There are skills to sizing up a new situation, figuring out what’s important, what you want to accomplish, and how to achieve it.

One crucial thing here is learning to set aside “what you wish were true”, including “what you wish was a good strategy, because it’s familiar”. (See “grieving”, above).

A lot of strategizing is asking yourself the right questions. Some questions I frequently ask myself, that each have an essay-worth of content with examples:

• “What’s my goal?”

• “What are a few options for how to pursue my goals?”

• “What’s hard about this problem, and how can I deal with that?”

• “What’s impossible about this problem, and how can I deal with that?”

  • “If I break it down, are the reasons it’s impossible also impossible? Or merely very hard?”

• “What are some resources I have?”

• “What questions are useful to ask, that if I knew the answer, would help me?”

This may seem like a weird set of questions to be asking. I’m bringing it up because they are the tools I have, for dealing with overwhelming problems. You might end up having a different set of questions that work better for you. But it seemed useful to give at least some examples, before I get into “what’s probably gonna happen?”.

Plucky and Pragmatic Attitude

I do a lot of grieving an’ shit. It’s important, for actually making peace with big haunting things. But, for most people I expect it’s not helpful to be mopey and focused on losing things. The point of grieving is to resolve itself, and get to a place where you can approach life with an open, free heart.

There’s shit to do. Some of it will difficult. But, we can have fun while we’re doing it.

I have at least some specific thoughts on “what to do”, but in the next post, I’m going to outline the current scope of the problem.