I saw the Northern Lights for the first time in my life on Thursday, and despite the streetlamps and light pollution, even in Littleton MA, it was indeed magical. I would have likely missed the whole thing had it not been for a friend from the lab who had written to alert us of the possibility, as well as a social media post that I saw in real time around 7pm.
The magic and wonder of such a phenomenon brings us together, like the solar eclipse earlier this year. The next morning I saw so many pictures and posts marveling over the event.
I was aware, too, of all the people that were missing it, as Dev, Pumpy, and I stood outside around 7:15pm, staring up into the diluted darkness. Cars whooshed by, quite oblivious, and our neighborhood lay quiescent and reposed--everyone tucked inside. I thought for a second about running around and knocking on doors, telling everyone to come out and look up!
There are so many things that we miss, given the demand on our time these days and the overwhelming magnitude of options. Our blistering technological evolution is certainly making it possible for us to do more and more with the time we have. I worry, though, that the emerging AI tools at our disposal are encouraging us to give up our human superpower of synthesizing and expressing what we learn, observe, and feel.
For instance, the AI-helper on this Wix blog editor is needling me: every line that I write has a "magic star dust" icon next to it. If I just gave in and clicked on it, presumably AI would show me a more eloquent way to express myself. I am close to succumbing. I cannot get away from it, I cannot remove it from this blog editor -- it is haunting me and following me, line by line. I find it wildly ironic that the Wix icon for AI is magic star dust. AI is not magic. Its powers of synthesis are built from the strands of thought that we generated with our own minds and wrote down.
These unprecedented times demand us to use these tools carefully, thoughtfully. I think some will. The ones who have the strength and mettle of oak, perhaps. But the insidious nature of time-saving and thought-numbing AI-helpers is that they are too siren-like for the rest of us mortals to resist.
The AI "magic star dust" icon even hovers covetously over the lines of poems that I occasionally include here -- imagine AI rewriting the lines of Emily Dickinson and Mary Oliver! Such a circular, preposterous farce, when it is poets like these that, unbeknownst to them, are training generative AI language models in the first place.
Magic comes from the Northern Lights, and what we feel within ourselves when we witness solar energy exciting star dust -- when we feel compelled to share the emotions that come spilling forth in words that are ours.
Comments