Freddie deBoer:

Ultimately, I do want to tell people to please try and chill out, yes. No, I don’t think AI Jesus is about to come and initiate the Rapture, and the desire for that to be true seems to be derived from very naked psychological needs. We live in a mundane world, a world of homework and waiting for the bus and sorting the recyclables and doing the laundry and holding your shirt over your nose when you enter a public bathroom and trying to find a credit card that offers a slightly better points program. It just keeps going, day after day after grinding day. You never get removed from it, never escape it. And yes, there’s transcendence and beauty and fun and satisfaction and growth and meaning, all of it! But you find that all in the mundane, generally; those few who spend their lives in a state of constant stimulation and novelty, well, God bless them. Most of the time they didn’t get there through their choices but through random chance. I’m saying all of this because I think a lot of people spend their time yearning for some great fissure in their lives where there’s a massive and permanent division between the before and the after, and all of this AI stuff is giving rational people an excuse to be irrational. (Of course, this is the number two fantasy behind the great American civic religion, “Someday, I’ll be a celebrity.”)

You have to imagine a life you can live with, where you are, when you are. If you don’t, you’ll never be satisfied. Neither AI nor anything else is coming to save you from the things you don’t like about being a person. The better life you absolutely can build isn’t going to be brought to you by ChatGPT but by your own steady uphill clawing and through careful management of your own expectations. You live here. This is it. That’s what I would tell to everyone out there: this is it. This is it. This is it. You’re never going to hang out with Mr. Data on the Holodeck. I know that, for a lot of people, mundane reality is everything they want to escape. But it could be so much worse.