Where we’re going, where we’ve been
Everything old is new again.
That feels especially true as of recent. This blog is new, but I’m not new to blogging. I used to blog in college. Mostly philosophical musings dripping with pseudo-profundity, but I always found it soothing to sit and write. I’d often stay up till early in the morning writing, refining, and tweaking some topic picking at my mind. It was frustrating but largely cathartic, and in the years I’ve not done such a thing, I’ve missed it.
This space is relatively safe. I don’t promote this website anywhere, and while it’s crawled by scrapers and agents and whatever else, the only time I really share it is when applying to a job (which isn’t something I do often and have no plans of doing anytime soon).
But, due to that, that safety doesn’t feel completely safe. Like LinkedIn. You know not to post inane, offensive, etc. things there. How do I balance that here in my own space, where I want to share myself, but also not worry about limiting my potential in the future?
I’ve been diagnosed with depression. One day ago I started a course of Prozac. I don’t know, maybe sharing that here isn’t a good idea. You could ask everyone I know and no one would say they think of me as someone who’s depressed or needs medication for such a condition. I’m generally considered one of the higher or highest performing people at whatever position I hold, and probably come off affable and quick to laugh.
Turns out I’m crazy, though.
Kidding. Really.
No, it’s not that those things aren’t true, but as I’ve come to understand depression doesn’t make the good qualities fake or untrue, it just makes it feel like it. Growing up in the south, it doesn’t feel proper to talk about it. It doesn’t feel like something I can admit openly and ever be trusted with the type of roles and responsibilities to which I aspire. How is it that to be a human in this world, we must hide our humanity?
It makes me think of AI. We criticize this new intelligence, and mock those who we catch using it. Why, if the professional world is racing towards AI transformation, does it still feel improper to work with and generate outputs with AI? Is it some internal feeling that if discovered, people won’t actually think you did the real work? Or is it more about our fear that we can be replaced? Or is it that in “generating” any part of the creative process what we cede is always the part that feels most highlighted for everyone else?
In being told I have clinical depression and coming to accept it, I’ve tried to understand what it would feel like to not be depressed. It’s not that I feel so awfully sad constantly, it’s just that I’m in a world that I can’t imagine not being in. I’m told that at some point, the thoughts and feelings I have are likely to improve, and again it’s not that I won’t be sad, but that being sad won’t bring me down totally with very little respite. But I struggle with this. How do I know when I’m better? How do I know that what I’m feeling is normal?
Isn’t it like this with AI, too? Aren’t we in this moment where simultaneously we know what it’s like to not have it, but it’s getting harder and harder to imagine not having it?
I’m not equating depression to AI or making some political or technophobic statement. I just mean, how do we know when we get to the point we’re hoping to get to? And what is that point? When I think about depression, I’m not sure I can define what point I’m trying to get to. Happy, I guess, but it’s not like I’m not ever happy now. Depression isn’t a total lack of happiness or happy moments. How do we answer that question for AI? How do we know when we get there? Will we look back and pity what it was like, or will we just settle into it and look forward to what’s next?