🙋‍♂️ I'm the Author, it's Me

Whether you're a longtime reader or a first-timer, there are a few things you should know:

One: I'm obsessed deeply intrigued with finding the sweet spot that balances one's humanity with one's desire and capacity to get things done.

Two: I have evolving, nuanced, sometimes conflicting thoughts on AI. I am concerned with its proclivity to lie with abandon. I think it's at its most damaging to the individual when one lets it act as an easy button for something that should actually be the result of productive struggle. As an ever-amateur musician, I find AI-generated music soulless and sickening.

Yet I find genuine utility in its ability to help me solve for things like pet coding projects, and I don't mind acknowledging that I use it regularly for discrete tasks...and that I think there's a way to do so responsibly. Heck, when I talk about writing, I'm often referring to dictation, which helps me massively with overcoming my disability and relies on AI not to change words, but to ensure that the words I say aloud actually match what hits the page.

Three: If you've received an email from me, I wrote that email.

That third one might sound like a strange thing to mention, let alone be proud of. But as we cast about The AI Slopocalypse, clinging to shreds of what used to unambiguously make us human, I think it's actually more important than ever to identify with specificity and intentionality when and how we are using certain tools. And, perhaps more importantly, when and how we are not using them.

Let's stipulate that email, on balance, kind of sucks.

We may like the phrase "this meeting should've been an email," but I think that's less about a desire for more email than it is an acknowledgment that emails are tantalizingly easy to breeze through and/or ignore. We don't actually want more email, and yet there's something kind of grotesque about the fact that some of us, present company included, get a little dopamine hit when we see that there's email in the inbox to check.

Which, by the way, do yourself a favor and turn off notifications for email. And while you're at it, turn 'em off for basically everything that isn't absolutely necessary information.

Part of my practice, as a human striving to let go of obsessions with maximizing the amount I can get done, has been to actually allow myself to be less responsive to email. That isn't to say I can just completely let it go, of course, and I'm sure there are some folks who may read this who would wish that I'd actually be more responsive. But I didn't like being and being known as the person who would respond to every email almost instantly.

My working, highly controversial theory is that there is actually more to life than email. And since I came to the realization that the prize for email is more email, I've decided to aim a little higher and gauge my worth on other metrics.

I would seem, then, to be the prime candidate to have AI handle email for me. If it's mostly rote yet necessary communication, why bother writing it myself, let alone actually reading all of it with my own degrading eyes?

I do so, channeling my inner luddite, for two reasons:

• Because for all its faults, email serves as a vestige of a passing era when we actually took the time to consider how we communicated with each other, and I stubbornly think that's worth preserving, even in bastardized form like what modern email has become
• Because if I hit the point where AI is drafting (even sending!) my emails for me, I'd rather just completely transcend to an email-less existence and move on to entirely different modes of communication altogether. Buy me a Friend pin and stick a fork in me — I'm done. (don't actually do that, as I'll crush the pin between my palms and stop talking to you)

Like it or not, email still serves a purpose. With every AI-generated message, we move further from a purpose of genuine value.

And while I'm picking on email here, it's actually much broader than that.

I want you to know that if you read something I've written, that I actually wrote it. That's important to me, dear reader.

And to the extent you are sending things to me for my reading pleasure, I'd appreciate it if you could do the same. I don't mind one bit if you use it for background research or even for advice on how to approach a particular topic. But I still want to hear directly from you, the human before the @, and trust that the words I think you wrote were actually written by you.

Call me naive or inefficient, but I think that's a reasonable expectation. It takes mutual commitment to actually make it self-reinforcing, but sometimes you have to be the first one to make the pledge and hope others return it in kind.

Yours, one word at a time,

-Rye