I wrote this post with an audience of “artists who are worried about AI” in mind, published on a new blog, The Human Spirit. [1]
My guess is, the 21st century will be a period of rapid change, that feels kinda crazy. I think there’ll be a few skills that used to be a Nice-to-Have (like knowing how to dance well), and that turn into more like a necessity (like reading and writing).
A particular skill I think will be important for people to cultivate is orient speed.
By “orient speed”, I mean: The skill of noticing when some new information has major ramifications. And, instead of shrugging and moving on with whatever you were doing anyway – rapidly thinking through the new implications, and re-evaluate your plans.
We spend much of our lives on autopilot – we get up, make our morning coffee, go to work, hang out with some friends or family in the evening, without having to explicitly strategize about it. You may have a way of living your life that mostly works for you. But sometimes life throws you a curveball. You get fired, your romantic partner breaks up with you, there’s a global pandemic. You need to figure out a new way to live your life.
I think the 21st century is going to throw us a lot of curveballs.
Three examples of what I mean by “curveball” are the rise of social media (and various downstream effects on mental health and social organization), the global covid pandemic (which both disrupted the lives of individual people and triggered significant government response), and the invention of AI generated artwork (which is in the process of radically changing the professional art world).
There’s some stable and comforting about having plans. Often, when people’s plans are disrupted, they look for a way to stick to those plans, and tell themselves the disruption isn’t that bad. Sometimes they’re right.
But sometimes, they find themselves having slid into an autopilot of “use social media for years without reflecting on whether it’s making you angry or anxious or lower-attentions-span”. Or, they find their existing autopilots no longer working because they are now working from home, and a lot of their habits for getting moving and energized no longer work (i.e. during a pandemic it may be less natural to get a brisk walk in each day if you don’t need to go to work. Or, you may not have a natural place to socially unwind with coworkers around the watercooler).
It used to be that the world changed very slowly – people did the same jobs and roles for generations. Since the industrial revolution, it’s started to change faster – industries get disrupted every couple decades. I think that’s going to start coming faster, both because of artificial intelligence, and because of how globally connected the world has become.
Whatever industry you work in, over the next decade or so, it’ll probably get disrupted by AI in some way. Moreover, it’ll likely get disrupted multiple times, so it’s not enough to learn to adapt to one new change. You need to learn to adapt to changes, continually.
This may feel kind of exhausting. It kinda is. But, becomes less exhausting until it’s just sorta normal. Meanwhile I think you can start to practice individual skills in lower-stakes contexts.
There is a skill of noticing change.
There is a skill of realizing the implications of that change.
There is a skill to emotionally handling those implications, if they are scary or disruptive.
There is a skill of, when all is said and done, putting the effort into thinking through new life plans, if your old life plans look like they won’t work anymore.
Most people take weeks or months to really respond to new information that disrupts their major life plans. But you can change your mindset to how you relate to new information, such that it feels less disorienting and you can quickly figure out how to strategize in the new world you find yourself in.
There’s a lot of depth to each of those four skills. The same way that drawing can start with you scribbling something in crayon that mom puts on the fridge, and escalate all the way up to painting the Sistine Chapel – there is a wide range of skill you can have at “realizing the implications of something”, and there’s a wide range of skill you can have at emotionally processing it, and acting on it.
“Orienting” is what I call the collective output of “notice / realize implications / emotionally process / replan”.
I’m hoping to convince you that orienting is a skill, and that you can get better at it.
Some examples of future posts that’ll go into more detail:
The Pandemic as case study, of what various levels of “orient skill” looks like.
Emotional whiplash, and navigating what you think the world is “supposed” to look like.
The Art of Grieving, when something changes that was deeply important to you. (this existing post is pretty good)
“Looking ahead” – seeing some evidence, and extrapolating where it’ll lead.
Cultivating an outlook of “reorienting is normal and ordinary, not an intense special occasion.”
In other future posts, I might talk more about the specific implications of AI – what I think it’ll mean for jobs, what it’ll mean for art, what it’ll mean for “meaning.” And, what it’ll mean for humanity as a whole.
But, everything I have to say about that rests on a background belief that “orienting quickly and smoothly” is one of the most important skills you need, that any the practical advice I have will be built on.
- ^
The blog is not ready for primetime yet, I’m reworking some framing and experimenting with ways of tackling various issues.
Interested to see what you have to say here. In my experience, the emotional processing stage is often the bottleneck, both in that it’s the one that people have the hardest time with, and in that it creates bottlnecks in the other stages by disincentivizing giving them too much energy because they create more emotional processing. Once the emotional processing is quick, then the others start to speed up because it’s no longer true that orienting to something new is painful.
Yeah agreed on emotional-processing being the bottleneck (but, with a caveat: when I’m communicating to the art community, a lot of ‘rationalist skills’ like ‘form a model’ and ‘make predictions’ and ‘form agentic plans on purpose’ may not be in the water supply as much)
I suspect most of what I have here is sort of covered in Deliberate Grieving and maybe an overall mindset shift of “Don’t think of ‘your plans’ as something that aren’t supposed to change’”, so when you feel the emotional whiplash or resistance to your plans changing, you kinda shrug and go “oh, ugh, okay, gotta replan” instead of “oh ugh this is so unfair why is this happening it’s surely not happening.”
I forget what’s in the deliberate grieving post, but based on what you say here, I’ll note that what I have in mind is largely about identity, not plans. As in, the root of emotional processing is attachment not to an idea about plans but an idea about the self. When one thinks “this is a great plan” the second thought is often “and I’m a great person for coming up with such a great plan”. If the plan isn’t great, then the person might not be either, and that’s way more painful than the plan not being great.
Based on a lot of observations, I see rationalists sometimes manage to get around this because they are far enough on the autism spectrum to just not form strong a strong sense of identity. More often, though, they LARP at not having a strong sense of identity, and actually have to first get in touch with who they are (as supposed to who they wish they were) to begin to develop the skills to do actual emotional processing instead of bypassing it (and suffering all the usual consequences of suppressing a part of one’s being).