What Only a Human Can Do

Given that I am raising two teenagers, work at a non-profit organization focused on education, and am a professional writer in general, I think a lot about AI.

That’s not special, in itself. A lot of people think about AI. You can’t swing a metaphorical cat on the internet without hitting someone breathlessly asserting that AI, particularly generative AI, is either the very best or very worst thing to ever happen to humanity. 

(I am once again asking for anyone on the internet to just be normal about something. It’s unlikely to happen, but I ask anyway.)

And I’m not here to tell you that AI is, or is not, the devil. It is a tool, and as such, its usefulness or lack thereof depends entirely on how you deploy it and the skill with which you do so. My husband’s workshop filled with gadgets he would never want to live without is as useless to me as my crochet hooks and set of specialized spatulas are to him. The merit and value of these things are, and have always been, entirely individual. AI, in this regard, is not fundamentally different.

But Jen, you say, you are a professional writer! Writing is one of those jobs that AI is going to make obsolete within the next five minutes/months/years! If you care at all about your job and the quality of writing in the modern age, how can you be so blase about The Robot?

Great question, imaginary reader, I’m glad you brought it up.

And look, humanity is, and always has been, extremely good at creating work for ourselves. At every single point of technological revolution, once the dust settled, there was still work to be done that only humans can do. It’ll be fine. Don’t get me wrong, it’ll hurt for a while. But it’ll be fine.

But it is worth thinking about how AI and its uses are affecting the way people think and behave in a broad sense, particularly in the context of the most profound skillset humanity has yet developed for itself: literacy.

And yes, concerns about the current state of literacy are extremely valid. I am very aware that most people simply do not read all that much or all that well. No, I don’t like it. And it’s not hard to find people extremely willing to take Plato’s criticisms about literacy out of context and drop them into the unreserved defense of AI-for-everything.

Writing books—heck, writing in general—is an extremely tough row to hoe, and has been for decades now. This is the theme of a number of conversations I've had with my friend and writing partner, Kevin. We are helping each other through the process of writing our own respective novels. And there have been numerous points throughout the process where we have both openly acknowledged that writing a novel is an objectively stupid idea these days. 

The ROI is horrifying. I picked up a book at the library not too long ago from an author I'd read and enjoyed previously, and—as is the nature of such things—the cover proudly displayed that this bestselling author has sold, over the totality of his 30-40 published books, 36 million copies. 

In the world of book publishing, 36 million copies, even spread over (to round the numbers easily) 36 novels, is, in fact, a tremendous success. But let's be very optimistic about timelines and say that it takes a year to go from an empty Word document to a finished book landing on a shelf. A year of work for a million readers, to average it out. 

Meanwhile, a quick glance at my YouTube home page offers me video after video from channels that post anywhere from weekly to monthly, with views already deep in the six-digits and about a third of them with well over a million views. As a creative person interested in getting my ideas in front of people who also find them interesting, in what world does it make sense to write a novel no one (comparatively) will read instead of putting it in video format over the course of multiple installments?

Sure, it's never going to convey the same depth of content (as the perennial argument between book vs. movie reveals), but when the Marvel movie nets hundreds of millions of dollars while the novelist is lucky to break even, the calculus of reality pushes the creative in the direction of what pays the bills, no matter how much they personally would prefer it didn't. And when what pays the bills is objectively not as good—in craft, in creative fulfillment, in the benefits for the audience—the professional creative is in the position of damned if they do, damned if they don't. If they're damned either way, why not be damned with a better credit score?

So the reason Kevin and I are beating our heads against this particular wall is the reason that a lot of writers choose to do the same: we simply can’t not do it. 

There exists inside of us somewhere a story that will not leave us alone, and the only way we’ve discovered to get it to do so is to write it down. Then it exists somewhere other than inside the confines of our own skulls, and we can finally get a little bit of peace and quiet. Until the next story finishes germinating and starts yelling at us. Then the process starts over.

But while a storytelling compulsion is relatively common among storytellers, it is not, broadly speaking, common. Writers might want to write and read elegant, timeless, poignant prose, but most people are not writers. Most people are not even readers. Nor have they been for decades at this point.

The process that began with Reader’s Digest is being consumed and enhanced by AI. Why take the time and effort to read an entire book when you can get a summary that takes five minutes to read, generated just for you, in the time it takes to glance at your phone notifications? Why even bother to learn how to read a book at all?

This phenomenon is not confined to academics and literacy, either. It's crept into basic functional skills. My husband teaches driver's ed these days, and the percentage of kids who get into his car for what is supposed to be a final polish on well-established skills, without the core knowledge and skill set necessary to simply not be the problem out on the road, is, frankly, horrifying. It isn't necessarily their fault because their parents also don't really know how to drive.

So much of this comes down to: what are we teaching our children, and how are we doing it? The answers to those questions have been, for a very long time, "not much" and "very poorly." So, what's a person to do? There is no quick solution to this problem. Backfilling literal generations of poor education is a lot of very hard work.

Which brings us back to AI, I suppose, and my assertion that there will always be work that only humans can do. 

And some of that human-only work is parenting and educating our children. Sure, we can talk about the Zoomers being handed iPads as toddlers and the results of that particular experiment. But their parents were brought up in front of the television. And their parents likewise in front of the radio. Not all of them, but enough.

Enough Americans have been letting technology shoulder enough of the work of taking care of our children for enough years that the skills of actually raising kids are being lost in the same ways that cooking at home, fixing our own cars, and reading an entire book are being lost. 

And even so, I am not anti-AI. These skills are fading, but they are not gone. It is not too late to do something about it. And I firmly believe that it’s possible for robust literacy and sharp critical thinking skills to co-exist in a world with generative AI. It is still a tool, and a useful one in the appropriate contexts. And there are still enough people with enough will and know-how to perpetuate the human aspects of existence through this overexuberance of AI proliferation. 

Technology—any technology—exists to make certain aspects of our lives easier and more efficient. There’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not exactly chiseling these words into clay tablets, after all. And while I type them on a machine that automatically propagates the text into cloud-based storage, a machine is washing my dishes, and a different machine is automatically keeping my house at a comfortable temperature, and yet another machine is extruding plastics into shapes that make game night more entertaining. What a time to be alive!

But no machine will ever truly replace the conversations I have with my husband and children while we eat together a meal I prepared. But the meal, the conversation, even the dinner table itself, came into existence easier and more efficiently because of innumerable pieces of technology.

Parenting and education, literacy and critical thinking, can be enhanced and supported by technology—even AI. But it is incumbent on us, the humans, to be the responsible parties. Not rules or regulations or laws. Not restrictions or requirements. Humans and our own decisions.

Any tool can be misused—dangerously, even. But it's a poor craftsman who blames his tools, to lean on an old adage. So the problem is not, and never has been, any particular piece of technology itself. The problem—inasmuch as it is a problem—is human responsibility and decision-making.

And that is another thing that only a human can solve.