Learning without shortcuts

Have you ever just sat and watched the steam from your cup slowly swirl upwards?

If you know me well, you know that I am vehemently opposed to AI as a basic life tool. The term ‘Generative AI‘ is a purposeful misnomer. There is nothing generative about AI. Instead, it’s destructive. The exploitation of people and natural resources so a person can write a faster email or ask ‘what should I eat at this restaurant?’ is mindboggling to me.

But I digress (I intend to write a longer piece about my disdain for planet-destroying tech later on). I recently came across this piece (amazingly titled ‘Compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting’) about how so many people are now using AI tech to avoid their own critical thinking and to avoid many vital experiences of what it is to become a fully realized person:

We’ve created a culture that treats depth like inefficiency. One that wants love without awkwardness, wisdom without confusion, transformation without the growing pains that crack us open and rebuild us from the inside out. And in doing so, we’ve accidentally engineered away the most essentially human experiences: the productive confusion of not knowing, the generative power of sitting with difficulty, the transformative potential of things that resist compression.

This joins nicely with one of my favourite concepts, wabi-sabi – the understanding that beauty lies in imperfection, in experience, in the unknown. I want to add whatever the opposite of compression culture is (‘expansion culture’?) to the ‘slow living’ movement.

Read the piece in its entirety here. It’s rather poetic.