Hey you,
I have reason to hope that AI is driving us back toward human connection. I know that sounds like a paradox. We do paradoxes here.
This morning I sat down with Dr. Sam Illingworth, a Full Professor of Creative Pedagogies at Edinburgh Napier University, a poet, and the creator of the Slow AI curriculum, to talk about what it actually feels like to live inside this time.
Here’s where we landed: we’re in a faith-based moment. There’s a widespread belief that the machines will save us from ourselves, that they’re better than us, that they can’t do bad things. Sam calls it “machine supremacy.”
But he’s spent years researching what people actually want, including 10,000 students in the UK. Turns out: people don’t want fake interaction, they want real connection. Companies like Klarna learned this the hard way: after replacing two-thirds of their workforce with AI, they had to rehire the humans because people don’t want to talk to a chatbot. AI is hitting its limits in therapy, customer service, and in all the places that actually matter to people. And those limits are sending us back toward each other.
We covered a lot of ground on the way there:
Data sovereignty: what rights you have over your data and what you can actually do about it, from running a small language model locally on your own device for free to having a family safe word so you can tell the difference between your loved ones and a deepfake.
AI as a mirror to ourselves, reflecting back what it’s hoovered up from every single internet forum (with the caveat that the mirror mainly shows white Western heterosexual cisgendered men at the epicenter of privilege). And how we can change what we see.
Why the tech lords who studied philosophy at Stanford and Duke are now telling you those degrees have no value.
“They don’t want you looking at history, they don’t want you looking at ethics, they don’t want you looking at language, because when you do, you start being able to put these pieces together.”
The tech industry is highly encouraging us to exist individually, to wrestle with it all by ourselves, to compete with each other, to stay in FOMO and stay relevant. It’s playing on those fears that we all carry that we might not have value.
When we are able to reduce one part of a workload from eight to one hour, we choose, subconsciously, to fill the other seven hours with more work to get ahead so we don’t fall behind. What if instead, you used those seven hours to read a book, start a protest, write some poetry, or call someone that you love?
That works so much better in multiplayer mode, when we consider ourselves a collective “we” instead of a series of individual “I’s.” I need someone who cares for me to help hold me accountable and remind me that I’m here to live life, not optimize it with the use of machines constantly optimizing.
Watch the full conversation above and then tell us in the comments: what’s the best thing you could do with the time AI gave you back?
A huge thank you to Sam. Find him at Slow AI and pick up his book GenAI in Higher Education.
If you haven’t grabbed our AI Go Bag yet, now’s a good time. It’s a practical guide to taking back some control over your digital life. Subscribe below and we’ll send it straight to you!
Go slow,
Baratunde
Thanks to the entire Life With Machines team, especially Layne Deyling Cherland and Alie Kilts for editorial and production support.
