My Real Fear of AI

At a previous library job, I helped host a series of technology drop-in sessions: a couple hours for people to bring in their devices and get help figuring out how to use them, walking them through their frustrations and pinch points.

Often after I had shown someone how to do something, they would ask me how I knew how to do that. Most of the time, I didn’t. I just poked around until I figured it out. This is really the core skill of using modern technology: the willingness to figure it out. (Also, a base knowledge of how to poke around safely.)

Sometimes it’s hard to figure out how to make your tech do what you want. Sometimes it’s not obvious or intuitive where certain functions live. Sometimes you have to click through way too many options until you find what you’re looking for. Sometimes, it takes longer than you want it to.

The number one thing we tried to teach folk was persistence in the face of frustration.

Which highlights my biggest fear about AI and how it’s being deployed in our society:

We use it to offload the frustrating and time-consuming things we don’t want to have to do. It encourages and rewards our impatience.

This is anathema to building and maintaining persistence. It actively undermines resilience.

It scares me to think who we’ll be as people and as a society if we lose our ability to persist in the face of frustration, if we lose our resilience through difficulties. I can’t see how this leads us to any kind of good place.

People without persistence or resilience are a people easy to control. The more dependent we become on external agents to do the hard things for us, the easier we become to control.

I believe this is exactly what the tech oligarchs want.

It has often been said—and often by me—that AI is a tool. There are some things it does extremely well, and it can be very valuable in the right circumstances. I don’t believe the people currently building and deploying it are doing so for our benefit. The tech oligarchs are building a future where they can be in control and where they answer to no one. We’re putting ourselves at the mercy of venal, selfish people who care nothing for our well-being.

There’s no good outcome if we stay on this path.

In Praise of Simplicity

Back in high school, I knew a very gifted electric bassist. He started out by playing along to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Bootsy Collins, he got himself Louis Johnson’s video instruction series. By the time we graduated, he was starting to get through Jaco Pastorius tunes. Incredible technical virtuosity!

In our early 30’s, he got recruited into a bar band. All his bass lines were simple walking quarter notes on the root, maybe an occasional eighth note run for decoration. As simple as simple could be. Simple enough I could learn to play it.

He told me it’s the music he’s most proud of, that it’s the best music he’d ever made. It was the first time that his ego completely disappeared and the only thing he cared about was serving the songs. The songs needed simple, so he gave them something simple.

Another musician I know had almost the exact same evolution: started out mastering the most complicated techniques, developed incredible virtuosity on their instrument, and then decided one day to just start playing simple. I asked them why:

“I got bored with complicated,” they answered.

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Neurodivergence & Personal Identity

Recently, someone dear to me received an adult diagnosis of ADHD, and stated that they think I have it, too. No one had ever suggested that before. I fully disagreed with them.

I’ve known a lot of people with ADHD over the years. Theater and the arts tend to attract people who are very different from the “norm,” and that includes more neurodivergent folk than many other professions. The same is true of libraries, I think. Most of the women I’ve dated in my life have had ADHD. I’ve never seen much of myself in these people I’ve known. I’ve witnessed many of them struggle to function in the world, but that’s never been much of a challenge for me.

I have hyperfixation, but that doesn’t constitute a diagnosis of ADHD on its own. I have a long history of not doing things I don’t want to do, but that’s as much my innate contrarianism as anything else.

I recently read this excellent article:

“A Generation Got Told to ‘Just Try Harder.’ The Neuroscience Just Said ‘That Was Never Going to Work.'”
by Ross Grossman, February 4, 2026

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AI: What I Really Think

I’ve spent a lot of time and devoted a lot of attention to the development of AI over the past few years, and my thoughts about it can be summed up very simply:

Why are we trying so hard to remove people from the world we’re building for ourselves?

I don’t understand why this is the thing we’ve decided we should want.

Years ago, I read some commentary that said this about social media: “More and more of our social lives are being designed and maintained by deeply antisocial people.”

This is especially true of AI. The people building it all seem to be deeply antisocial, even misanthropic. I could also update this criticism for AI a couple other ways:

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Mastery

Malcolm Gladwell famously stated it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. This has been debunked over and over again by various experts. You can’t reduce growth and development to a formula: 10,000 hours = Mastery! How you spend each hour is the key.

I’m reminded of story I heard from my tai chi instructor:

A student of tai chi isn’t making any progress. The teacher asks him, “Have you practiced?”

The student replies, “I’ve practiced 100 hours since our last class.”

The teacher asks, “What do you do when you practice?”

“I do the form.”

“Do you pay attention to how you’re applying the principles?”

“No.”

“Do you actively seek out pockets of tension in your body and try to let it go?”

“No.”

The teacher tells the student, “You have not practiced 100 hours. You practiced one hour, 100 times.”

Intent and attention drive development. Even 10,000 hours will only add up to mastery if you spend those hours the right way. This brings me back to something I’ve posted about before: our cultural beliefs about time. “Time equals money!” is a frequent declaration, and it implies that we should reduce time spent in order to maximize profit.

But the key to quality is attention and care. Attention and care require an investment of time. 10,000 hours is a lot of time!

It’s also true that “haste makes waste.” Things done quickly are usually not done well.

In the end, my conviction is that quality matters most. Quality requires an investment of time. Things take as long as they take, if you want them done well. Stop worrying about time. What matters, what brings value to our endeavors, is intent, attention, and care.

Diversity Means Survival

I was perusing Bluesky recently, and saw a post about the newly discovered Neanderthal animal fat processing site:

This was my reply to it:

This got me thinking in a different way about the value of diversity.

We know that Neanderthal was as smart, maybe smarter, than us, and engaged in similar methods of thinking. And yet, they died out at the end of the last ice age and we didn’t. Why is that?

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Sometimes Our Job Is Hard

Several years ago, I worked for a nonprofit that did event-based fundraising. We purchased a new all-in-one software service that ran both the back-end fundraising and participant database, and our front-end event website, where participants could have a profile page and accept online donations. Because it was an all-in-one package, the way you configured each end affected how the other end functioned. Changes to any part of the system caused ripples to other parts. My job was to set up and configure the software, and provide tech support to participants.

The back-end database wasn’t easy to use: overly complicated, nonintuitive workflows. A colleague who worked in the accounting department, and who only interfaced with the back-end database, came to me with a list of things she hoped I could reconfigure to improve the workflow. I looked at the list and realized these changes would alter the participant front-end in ways that would make it much harder for people to use.

So I said no.

My colleague agreed when I showed her what the impact would be. We couldn’t make it harder for participants and donors in order to make our jobs easier. Better we deal with the difficulty than them.

I think about this whenever we look for ways to make our jobs easier. It’s totally fine to want to make our jobs easier, but there are going to be ripples that affect other people, either customers or colleagues. We need to be aware of how our workflows affect someone else’s, especially if we make their job more difficult in order to make ours easier. We need to consider whether that’s really what’s best for customers and the organization, and not just whether it’s best for ourselves.

Sometimes our job is just going to be hard.

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Efficiency Is A Terrible Goal

In a recent discussion, a group of us were talking through options for using LLMs to make some our work tasks more efficient. I made the comment that I don’t believe efficiency is the correct goal for us to focus on. This statement set some of my colleagues aback. Modern American work culture is so steeped in the ideal of efficiency, it seems tantamount to sacrilege to suggest we shouldn’t value it the way we do.

I want to take some time here to unpack this belief. There are good reasons why I feel this way, but I also need to caution myself against dismissing the very real values that efficiency can bring.

Let’s start with a trite phrase: “Time is money.”

This phrase never sat quite right with me. It feels more correct to say, “Time is value.” On the face of it, these seem like they should be the same statement: money is intended as a measure of value, after all. But something interesting happens when you delve deeper into them.

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There Are More Important Things than Being Right

There’s been an inordinate amount of ink spilled online about all the things that are wrong with online culture. Indeed, it’s one of the most popular subjects of online discourse. There are many ways the online culture we’ve created is toxic and amplifies the worst aspects of our nature. There are many factors which cause online toxicity, but the one I tend notice most is how so many people are obsessed with being right. And with making sure everyone knows it.

I keep seeing posts from the subreddit AITA. They show up on Twitter, Buzzfeed, lots of different places. They bother me. They’re emblematic of our need to prove ourselves right. Every AITA post is essentially someone asking for people to tell them they’re right. That doesn’t sound like such a bad thing, really, so why does it bother me?

Here’s a good example:

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Assume Better

A Selfish Reason for Choosing Compassion

I was driving to work the other day, in typical morning rush hour traffic, and another driver was being far too fast and aggressive: weaving through traffic, riding bumpers, cutting people off. When they cut in front of me, causing me to slam on my brakes which almost caused me to be rear-ended, I got mad. This driver was being a jerk: selfish, road hog, inconsiderate, dangerous. Why do they think they have more right to the road than any of the rest of us?

This morning, the same thing: overly aggressive driver, going too fast, riding bumpers, cutting people off. But this time, I saw the look on the driver’s face as they passed me:

Weeping. Sadness. Panic.

They were clearly in the midst of some kind of emergency. This person had a reason they needed to get somewhere quickly. They weren’t just being selfish and inconsiderate. Their need for the road actually was more important than mine.

This doesn’t excuse the dangerous driving: that was still a problem for the rest of us. But instead of getting angry, I felt empathy. I had compassion for this driver. I wondered what they faced and hoped they could get where they needed to be on time, without causing an accident.

In my first example, when I got angry at the other driver, it left me in a bad mood. My hackles rose, I was geared up for conflict with no way to resolve it. I got to work feeling on edge, in a negative headspace. This was not a useful way for me to start my day. It didn’t help me do my work.

This morning, when I felt compassion and sympathy for the other driver, it left me in a much better headspace. Compassion is a far more useful emotion to bring into the public service work I do.

The reality is neither driver will ever know how I reacted to them, nor how my reactions affected my mood. My reactions have no impact on them whatsoever. But the ways I react in these circumstances has a profound effect on me. When I assumed the other driver was selfish and inconsiderate, it affected me in a very negative way. When I assumed more positively about the other driver, it made my day better.

This got me thinking about how we make assumptions.

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