I Wrote This Post

Many people in my generation have had the experience of cleaning house after their parents pass away. Not a happy job, but the sweetest moments are finding some old letters. Perhaps they were love letters from long ago or letters that they wrote to you or you wrote to them that they saved. Such treasures! There they live again, their character remembered in their unique handwriting alongside the way they turn a sentence, the things they notice, what passes for news in their mind as they share a slice of their life or their exotic vacation.

 

As the generations pass, that is becoming more and more rare. If you’re lucky, there might be typed e-mails that were printed and saved or old school papers they wrote or Christmas card newsletters they sent. If you’re very lucky, you might uncover some old journals, still handwritten or find a folder on the computer of little poems they had jotted down or a little scrapbook with Letters to the Editor they had written. Minus the handwriting, some of the character is lost, but you can still locate the person in their grammar and syntax and unique comments about their time here on earth— what they noticed, what they wished for, what they hurt from, what they care about. 

 

Has anybody thought about this in our rush to replace human beings with artificial counterparts? What emotions will course through you as you read their school papers written by Chatgpt? Their letters to friends or colleagues or even enemies where they gave their power over to that oh-so-clever machine and lost themselves in the process. Lost a chance to leave their own footprint in the sand and settled for the machine walking the beach in its perfect evenly measured steps. 

 

When the kids clean out the house, will they weep as they read the avalanche of trivial text messages on their parents’ phone? Will they try to scroll back through past posts on Facebook? (And by the way, can you do that?). Will they frame art that was computer-generated and open their heart to the sounds of patched-in-music from Garage Band? Will they tell stories about their Dad shouting at people to move up at the intersection when turning left when traveling in driverless cars? Remember their Mom’s vibrant conversation with the taxi driver when the driver’s seat is now empty?

 

And when they’re gone, who will remember them and how? Who will care?

 

All of this prompted by a piece written by the current head of my old high school, Tim Lear. He notes the replacement of actual discussion around a table with all the screened communication, the growing sense that we think instant mediated communication brings us all together when in fact, it leaves us feeling lonelier than ever. In a letter to the community, he wrote:

 

Consistently showing up for each other is how we build community. It’s equally important to remember to show up for ourselves. In his recent New York Times essay (“For People to Really Know Us, We Need to Show Up”), Brad Stulberg writes that when we don’t make a habit of showing up, we’re increasing the chances that our absence will neither be noticed nor missed. Communities actually miss people. When fewer people start missing us, the resulting loneliness and isolation are a recipe for a myriad of negative effects on our physical and mental health. 

 

Every day, I see five to ten driverless cars traveling with no passengers around the streets of San Francisco and my heart sinks at each sighting. My teacher daughter told me some teachers are using Chatgpt to write their report card comments or graduation speeches for students. Every bureaucracy (except the DMV!) is making it hard to talk to a person on the phone or (God forbid!) in person. I am in no hurry to leave this planet, but this is starting to make the prospect more appealing. 

 

In short, this is not the world I signed up for. People are hopelessly flawed and in the last eight years of Republican insanity and Putin’s army, we seem to be getting worse and worse. And yet still I believe in our possibility and prefer us to machines. And yes, I’ve sacrificed writing these 3,791 Blogposts by hand, but still, every ounce of my character and thought and feeling can be found there for anyone who cares to look. I  wrote this post and all the others before and all the others to come. I will NOT let Chatgpt write tomorrow’s post while I sit in the backseat of a driverless car texting my friends.

 

In these ever more confused times, that ridiculous vow is an act of courage.