--- L.M. Sacasas, in Do Not Resign From Life, The Convivial Society: Vol. 7, No. 3 (2026)
Excerpt
Oddly enough, it turns out that loudly and frequently touting your product as a potential threat of world-historical proportions to human well-being was a bad marketing strategy. Human beings, after all, have no particular obligation to cheerfully cooperate with our own purported immiseration.
This purported immiseration would have both economic and psycho-social dimensions, but it is with the latter that I am mostly concerned right now. My working thesis about the generalized impact of “AI” as it is currently deployed can be summed up in the observation that the arc of AI bends toward demoralization. . . .
I believe that one dimension of this sadness or demoralization can be attributed to the simple fact that we are increasingly invited to outsource a class of activities that grant us a measure of satisfaction, accomplishment, and purpose. But it is not only the case that we outsource these activities and thus fail to reap their existential rewards, it is also true, as Marc Watkins recently noted, that the demoralization can set in as a function of AI’s ambient presence in a social ecosystem, such as, in Watkins’ case, the university, where he suggests “the true crisis here is purpose.”
