Metabolist@70: No Resolution Is the Process

Caution: Ambiguity Ahead

Just passed seventy articles in, and I am no closer to a verdict.

Weeding out the early attempts to find my intellectual footing, the corpus falls broadly into two camps: AI is transcendent, and AI is bad. Both, I think, are true.

I am at once enthralled by AI and repulsed by it. I watch what it has done for me and what it is taking from me, what I have freely given up because of its power and the facility it produces.

I am in an intellectual and creative dance with AI that I have described as both a pas de deux and a Lindy Hop, but which might also be accurately described as slam dancing, or at times being passively carried around like a baby.

In Medicine, the tableaux I know best, AI is making good clinicians better and bad clinicians worse. Both are true. There is no turning back, nor should there be. Given adequate levels of training and acumen, your doctor is a better physician if they use AI, and you are the better for it.

On Substack, AI use is simultaneously ubiquitous and performatively reviled. I choose not to perform. This is my work product, but I leverage AI in the doing. I want you to know that so you can judge for yourself its value versus provenance.

Since I leverage AI in the creating of this newsletter, my legitimacy may be questioned: “who is really the author here, the man or the machine?” I am willing to take that chance. I would rather model what I believe is the next iteration of intellectual life than pretend otherwise. Man plus machine may exponentially improve me. It may also introduce a cognitive Achilles heel I have not yet fully mapped. Again, both are true. Seventy articles in and that tension has not collapsed.

Going forward, I will continue using AI as a thinking and creative partner, and to describe what that is like, what I observe, and what it gives to and takes from me. What happens to the neuroscience of my own thinking when I increasingly allow a machine to assist me?

I will continue to look at the individual human, societal and global effects of this technology in the venues where it is most consequential: medicine, politics, finance, world affairs, and the evolving question of what it means to be human as we create something that may ultimately surpass us in all relevant domains.

My experience here is the test tube. I am aware that in naming myself as both observer and observed, something will be lost. I will count on you to point that out and correct me when necessary.

I am allowing the thinking and the writing to take me where it will. The alternative, optimizing for audience retention, produces something I have no un-ambivalent interest in making. I have decided that I am ultimately happier unbound than doing this as a metric slave. If it cost me readers, that’s a fair price.

This is a signpost, not a summit. The journey continues, and you are welcome.