We shouldn't view technology as separate from ourselves. It is the unique way humans substantiate mental constructs in the world, from language to machines. We co-evolve with these creations, and understanding them is key to understanding ourselves.
Human artists create to express their own visions, not to satisfy audience desires. AI excels at filling this gap, creating highly specific, personalized content for an audience of one. These two roles are complementary, not competitive.
Ideologies hijack the human need for mythology, offering simplistic and often destructive narratives. True art and fantasy serve as a moral duty to "escape" these bad mythologies by reconnecting us with authentic, life-giving stories from the collective unconscious.
As Daoist philosophy illustrates, language is merely the trace left behind by reality, not reality itself. Since LLMs are confined to this linguistic shadow, they can exhibit intelligence but never access true wisdom, which exists beyond words and symbolic representation.
For centuries, we've assumed high intelligence implies consciousness, will, and subjectivity. AI models, which can pass the bar exam but have no inner experience, shatter this assumption. This decouples intelligence from personhood, forcing us to re-evaluate what we truly value.
Sci-fi has a terrible track record for prediction. Its true power lies in creating enduring mythological metaphors, like Orwell's "Big Brother" or Shelley's "Frankenstein," which give us a vocabulary to debate and understand the present impact of technology.
Technology isn't a cold, separate discipline; it's the manifestation of our deepest desires and dreams. This is why we instinctively give it mythological names (e.g., Apollo space program) and frame it in epic narratives. It's how we make sense of our own creations.
The greater threat from AI isn't job displacement, but the acceleration of a long-standing trend: reducing humans to standardized, predictable components in a larger system. Call center scripts and assembly lines mechanized humans long before AI, making them easy to replace.
Subscription-based AIs that only see your public output can't truly represent you, because most of your identity is in the choices you reject. A genuine AI "egolette" requires training on this hidden data, which is only possible with total user control over local hardware and data.
Panics over AI-generated content mirror fears from the "age of mechanical reproduction" (photography, printing). We already live in a world of mass-produced "slop" (e.g., clip art), yet human art thrives. AI will displace some roles but also enable new forms of creativity.