No need to use AI — the new Atlantis

The rise of AI forces most people to ask: How should I use it? However, this question assumes too much. Instead you should ask: Do we have the freedom not to do so?

The answer is simple. Yes, that’s right. If you don’t want to use AI – if you don’t like it, don’t find it useful, or aren’t interested in adding it to your digital toolkit – you can opt out. It is not necessary to use it. Whatever the final cost, it remains perfectly reasonable to postpone, perhaps forever, at this point.

If this sounds like heresy, that’s because it is. What we are being taught every week and every day is that generative artificial intelligence is inclusive, transformative, and engaging. It touches every aspect of our lives and reshapes them from the inside out. Therefore, it’s best to hop on the train now instead of waiting until it’s too late. God forbid you be left behind.

These kinds of stories, sometimes sincere and sometimes propaganda, have been going on forever. That applies not only to technology but also to politics. The idea is that because the shape of history is determined by top-down structural change, we can know the future before it arrives. For this reason, engineers speak in the future tense. They don’t say “may,” “might,” or “could,” they just say “will.” After all, they visited the future that befalls us and returned like prophets to proclaim its inevitable arrival.

But the paradox is that if that future is inevitable, there is nothing you or I can do about it. Writing in the 1940s, C.S. Lewis observed a similar movement among communist writers. He said, “They tend to tell me that when all else fails, we should push for revolution because ‘revolution is bound to happen.'” Some have dissuaded me from my own position on the astonishingly unfounded basis that if I persist in this belief I must eventually be “overthrown.” He argued that he must be right because he could kill me, as cancer might argue if it could talk. ”

Those who truly believe in the gospel of AI are making mistakes eerily similar to those of mid-century communists. Because they imagine themselves to be on the right side of history—that there are sides to history—they cannot tolerate even mild dissent.

But the freedom to say no remains.

Take Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University. Last summer, he wrote an essay about what he called the “peculiar tenacity of AI deniers.” He cites the “extreme” example of magazine writer Gia Tolentino. new yorkerShe “honestly admits the surprising fact” that she has never used ChatGPT. Mounk derided Tolentino’s criticism of AI as being “similar to a reactionary 19th century priest denouncing trains as the work of the devil,” before proudly stating that he himself has never been guilty of riding a train.

But the problem is that there were actually major trade-offs in the spread of rail. It would not have been unreasonable to point this out at the time, as someone like John Ruskin did. Also, it is not foolish to criticize the influence of railways even though you have never ridden a train. You don’t have to drive your car to see the exhaust fumes emitted by your car. You don’t need to “talk” to chatbots to find out where they come from, how they work, and how networks can impact human life.

What’s surprising is that Tolentino isn’t criticizing the effects of AI without having used it. That means, as Mounk puts it, he believes revolution is “inevitable” and to think otherwise is “burying your head in the sand.”

The bottom line seems to be that if you want to be on the right side of the revolution, use AI. But shouldn’t the logic be exactly the opposite? That is, the more revolutionary and disruptive a new technology appears to be, the more slowr Should we adopt it? Do revolutions always just get on top of it?

Let’s consider another example. Derek Thompson interviewed co-founder Jim VandeHei on a recent episode of his podcast, Plain English. politiko and Axios. At one point, Thompson called VandeHei “extremely AI-enabled.” So he suggests talking to the skeptics.

VandeHei’s reaction is clear. He began by saying, “There is nothing I feel more passionate about than this.” He chimes in like an evangelist: “You’ll start to see the magic. You’ll start to understand why people in San Francisco aren’t sleeping, why people like you and me are staying up late at night building things.” His example: “In the last month, especially with Claude’s explosive influence, we’ve created six different high-performance prototype apps.” As the adjectives stack up — magical, intuitive, beautifulI — The lesson for the unconverted becomes clear. That means start building.

Rather than act as a journalist asking questions, Thompson doubled down on VandeHei’s resurrection sermon, saying, “Pay me $20. I think Jim is right. Pay me $20 and see what you can build.” Skeptics who tried early versions of ChatGPT and were disappointed, he says, are the same people who “tried a cell phone in 1989 and decided that a smartphone in 2026 wouldn’t work.”

This is another wonderful and thought-provoking analogy. Like Mounk’s railroad priest, the cell phone skeptics of the 1980s are not obviously wrong, at least on a spiritual level. Yes, smartphones in 2026 will be fully functional. But if cell phone skeptics back then could opt out and avoid the eventual domination of the little black mirror in everyone’s pockets and bags, she might look pretty good now, even prophetic. She may have retained her “old brain,” in the words of Nicholas Carr.

Don’t get me wrong, cell phone skeptics are certainly missing out. In a sense, she would have been left behind. There are real trade-offs to living without a smartphone these days.

But some of us are worth it. Resistance isn’t for everyone, but it’s still a perfectly reasonable choice. When Thompson compares early AI to early cell phones, it says to me: Please leave.

What about everyone participating? In January, Molly Cantillon, founder of AI assistant company NOX, wrote an essay called “AI is taking over my life and I love it.” She gave Claude “everything about my life,” including her calendar, finances, subscriptions, and sleep habits, and Claude, in her words, “promised salvation.” The AI ​​agent she built to “do all the tasks I need to do” has become what she calls a “watchtower,” a digital panopticon that never sleeps. She doesn’t regret it. “The tower gave me my life back.”

perhaps. But what are the characteristics of the lives that AI promises to save? Cantillon, by his own admission, was so overwhelmed by his schedule that he couldn’t sleep, “starting at 6 a.m. tracking 15 tabs…trying to parse out what the best trades are.” Perhaps the problem with her situation wasn’t that she lacked the all-seeing intelligence to rearrange her life to optimize performance. It means that she felt the need to optimize every moment of her life.

“The only cause of human unhappiness is not knowing how to stay quiet in a room,” says Pascal. Many people can’t bear to imagine sitting still while the world changes around them. Pioneers of the AI ​​apocalypse are joining fellow believers in the race to build artificial general intelligence.

This is the end of history and Tyler Cowen is the last man standing. Everyone is an entrepreneur and everyone is vibecoding. The futurists stand at the endpoint, cordially beckoning the rest to join them. They are perplexed that not everyone is rushing forward. The only enemies they can remember are knuckle-dragging Luddites, undefined and forever outdated.

What true believers don’t understand are everyday skeptics who aren’t hysterical or stupid: real AI atheists. But instead of asking more from technology, more and more thoughtful people are asking for less. I’m deleting apps instead of downloading new ones. They do their best to take their eyes off all-consuming devices and look at their faces, bodies, trees, birds, sky, and ocean. They are moving in the opposite direction to believers. It goes out of the screen, not into it.

I’m not questioning whether anyone would be justified in using AI. People are free to do so, and many will do so. All the energy, pressure, momentum, and funding in our culture is moving in this direction.

The more interesting question is whether someone is justified in their actions. do not have Use it. It seems to me that a surprising number of people use AI not because they need or want to use it, but out of some vague sense of social or even moral obligation. They feel unable to say: No, thank you. We’ll have to wait and see whether to use these tools or not.. They feel they lack agency. So when a new tool arrives on their doorstep, they sigh, shrug their shoulders, and start learning how to query.

But in recent decades, technological changes have all too often had the opposite effect of what their creators promised. Instead of empowering us, our devices and platforms disempower us, sap our energy, and instead of providing us with useful ways to save time and effort, we quickly add one more task to a never-ending checklist, or Microsoft’s “endless workday.”

what we need is permission: A reminder that we are free to do as we please and to say yes or no based on our own considered judgment. We don’t need to resign. Bow your head and submit. The truth is, there are no orders from above. There is no predetermined future that engineers have privileged access to. And even if there was, there would be no reason for the rest of us to help implement it. The march of AI progress may be worth resisting or slowing down.

There are characters in American literature who embody this form of resistance, the inner freedom of unyielding determination. His name is Bartleby. He comes from Herman Melville’s 1853 novel Bartleby, the Scrivener. When given instructions by his superior, Bartleby’s responses were calm but unmoving. “I will not.” Again and again Bartleby becomes more and more incredulous, his superiors demand orders, but again and again Bartleby’s answer is the same.

And when he was asked,why Do you refuse? ‘ replied Bartleby again. “I don’t want to do that.”

I offer Bartleby as a model for those who don’t want to accept the bloodless future of AI. Call it the “Bartleby Option.” If you don’t want to buy the latest widget, spend a fortune on the latest invention, or download the most popular app, you don’t have to, and you don’t owe anyone an explanation. All you have to do is make Bartleby’s words your own and repeat them like a mantra.

Say, “I think you should stop.” Then just say nothing and move on with your day, forgetting about the dumbfounded voice that declares otherwise.