Susan Schmaeling

I agreed to be interviewed today on a podcast about AI, where I could make my views about its spiritual dangers clear. I must say, I tire of having to call out the bad-faith actors who pretend to want to discuss AI's impact but really are just there to draw you into a dialogue that shills for tech interests. But I will always call it out. At one point the host read a "poem" to me, suspecting I'd be generous and find something to applaud in it, after which he could "get me" by revealing it was composed by AI. But I told him the truth. It was an awful piece of writing. I then proceeded to tell him what poems—what art, what being human—can really do to change our lives, by engaging us in the miraculous task of becoming. When you keep hearing people insist that AI will do what humans can, and that it can do it more cheaply, there are times, friends, when you have to tell people that if all they can think about is product instead of process, they have lost their way. Louis Armstrong was once asked what jazz is. "If you have to ask," he answered, "you'll never know." If you have to ask why the process of human creation is important (and spiritually fulfilling) in a world of computerized creation, you'll never know, at least until you open your heart to the possibility that we're here on this earth to do something more than make money and die.