Watching the Super Bowl is a study in the current cultural zeitgeist. This year, the message was clear: AI is here, and it’s here to make your life "easier." But as I watched the ads for Microsoft Copilot and others, I didn't feel inspired. I felt a profound sense of anxiety.
The AI Religion
We are witnessing the birth of a new religion. The "AI Religion" doesn't worship a god in the traditional sense, but it worships the idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful intelligence that can solve all our problems. We are being told to outsource our thinking, our creativity, and our decision-making to these models.
But what happens when we stop doing the hard work? What happens when we remove the "friction" from our lives?
The Super Bowl Ads: A Vision of Sterility
The Microsoft Copilot ad showed people "creating" with a single prompt. A young woman "writes" a movie script. A man "codes" an app. The implication is that the doing was the obstacle. But the doing is where the human is. By making everything instant, we aren't becoming more creative; we are becoming more detached from the process of creation.
The ads sell a version of the future that is strangely sterile. It's a world where everyone can produce a masterpiece, which ultimately means that nothing is a masterpiece.
The Crippling Anxiety of Consciousness
The real fear isn't that AI will become conscious and kill us. The real fear is that AI will make us lose our own consciousness.
Human consciousness is forged in friction. It is developed through struggle, through the physical resistance of the world, and through the slow, often painful process of learning a skill. When you remove that resistance, you remove the very thing that makes us feel alive and present. We are afraid of losing the very things that make us human.
Conclusion
We need to be careful about what we outsource. Efficiency is a great goal for a factory, but it's a terrible goal for a human life. We need the struggle. We need the difficulty. We need the friction.
Une note finale en italique : This article reflects on why we should embrace the "hard way" in an age of total automation.
