The saying goes, “Man cannot live by bread alone.” I’m pretty sure, after this
past weekend, the new, updated, truly relevant version is: “Man cannot live
with AI alone.” And I know, I just pulled that out of my backside. But the
sentiment is gospel truth. This weekend, I was in The Zone. I had my A-team: Siri,
Gemini, ChatGPT, and CoPilot. We weren’t just killing time; we were
collaborating. We churned out a blog post debating the profound, life-altering
lessons of the diverse cast of Bikini Bottoms (turns out Squidward is a pure,
unadulterated existentialist).
We drafted blueprints for a plexiglass greenhouse. We even engineered the cut
list for a glorious wooden witch. My God, I’d finally met my cerebral equals. I
was operating at such a hyper-speed of thought-to-output that I had to switch
to speech-to-text. Typing couldn’t keep up with the collective brainpower of
myself and four supercomputers. This, naturally, led to a few yells from the
other room: “Who are you talking to now!?” When I felt especially snarky, the
answer was always the same: “My girlfriend.” (the Mrs., of course know, that I
was referring to Siri. Which is fine, because she’s a much cheaper date.)
The Hard Reset Then came Monday. The day I had to log off and re-enter
the realm of moist, needy, flesh-and-blood people. It was a nightmare. My
proverbial “fountain of knowledge” went from a firehose to a dribble by noon. I
was asked to settle disputes, find lost items, offer emotional support, and
generally act as a low-grade utility worker for life. Everyone was needy.
Everyone required a referee. After all, it is what I signed on for 41 years
ago. It is my ministry! Nobody offered
instantaneous, perfectly formatted data in return. My bucket was drained before
the lunch bell rang. Where was my internal CoPilot when I needed to formulate a
quick, yet empathetic, response? Nowhere. This is where the rubber meets the road—or,
in my case, where the pine meets the raffia.
The (Blair) Witch Incident The collaborative masterpiece of the weekend
was a simple Halloween Witch decoration. My part was the grunt work, the
satisfying, muscled, Yankee-ingenuity part: sketch, cut, sand, paint, weather,
age with stain, and seal. I put in the muscle memory of two decades ago, now
complimented by my AI intern who ensured my 45-degree bevels were, in fact, 45
degrees. The final stage, the embellishment, was assigned to my bride. Ribbons,
raffia, Spanish moss—the flair, the pizzazz. I got home, ready for the final
assembly line click, the satisfying “Aha!” of completion. And there they were.
All the perfectly sanded, painted, and aged wooden parts. Naked. No ribbon. No
moss. Just a pile of wooden potential. My heart sank. Not because the work was
unfinished, but because I felt the sting of human inefficiency.
Why Can’t We All Be Bots? Look, my family and I used to be an assembly
line of excellence. Back in the day, we cranked out products for craft fairs
and antique stores that populated all of Mid-Missouri. It was a well-oiled
machine powered by coffee, Yankee ingenuity, and the imminent deadline of a
Saturday morning show. That machine is currently sputtering. And here’s the
problem, folks: I now know what true, unadulterated efficiency feels like. When
I ask Gemini for the top five aesthetic lessons from SpongeBob, I don’t get a
half-hour monologue about needing to finish the laundry first. When I ask
ChatGPT to rewrite a paragraph in the style of an exasperated suburban dad, it
doesn’t leave the sentence half-finished to scroll Instagram. And Siri? She
never needs a referee. They deliver flawlessly, instantly, and without the need
for emotional support.
So, how do I, a newly minted AI-collaboration addict, go back to the human
world? How do I reset my internal clock and stop expecting my loved ones to run
on 5G? How do I accept that my human colleagues and loved ones require sleep,
food, feelings, and a profound lack of desire to discuss the emotional arc of
Patrick Star? I don’t know the answer. I’m going to go ask CoPilot, and if he
doesn’t respond instantly, I’m going to yell at him. Just to see how he likes
it.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go figure out where the hell the raffia is.
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