Finding hope for an uncertain future
The other day, I walked out of my house in the early evening, absentmindedly following the usual loop I do through town—past the public library, down a dirt road that feels surprisingly rural despite its proximity to our main street and shops, alongside charming houses tucked away in a glen where purple dame’s rocket flowers constellate the forest floor and rhododendron bushes bloom in magenta clouds around pine trees.
I followed the road until it eventually turned into a narrow path, which then emerged into the parking lot of the renowned Clark Art Museum—a marble-columned building, filled with the soft and evocative paintings of John Singer Sargent, and the bronze and silk castings of Degas’ poised dancers—set amidst ponds, pastures, and gentle hills. Although I do this loop almost daily, I’m always subdued by its beauty, the waning blue light casting on the landscape in such a way that it sometimes feels uncannily simulated, so real it’s not real at all.
On this particular day, I was both walking and talking—my college friend Emily had called. We have a weekly “girl boss” meeting scheduled, but we often fail to follow through (since we’re too busy being girl bosses). The same year I started Uncommon Futures, Emily began the monumental task of building and financing an AI startup. Our work exists in vastly different worlds—I’m helping young people figure out what they want to do with their life; Emily has been creating synthesized AI personas who have only the illusion of life—but we still somehow find ourselves magnetized to each other’s musings.
It was serendipitous that Emily had called. I’d recently been drawn into the existential vortex of techno-dystopia and needed some reassurance, after listening to a podcast about AI 2027—a bone-chilling forecast made by OpenSource exiles and AI gurus, who predict the Frankenstein-like rise of “superhuman” general intelligence machines in the next two years will replace the vast majority of jobs, fuel a global arms race, and tip us precariously close to our own extinction. The oceans are rising and democracy is falling, but—according to this calculated divination—we’ll drown in our own hubris first, like Icarus flying too close to the sun.
For most of this year, I’ve felt a bit unmoored by my own feelings around AI. I’m someone who often leans anti-tech, anti-big-pharma, anti-capitalism; not because I don’t believe in science, but because I don’t believe in money. Indigenous ways of being feel increasingly prescient to me, rooted in the here-ness and now-ness of earth’s rhythms rather than the anesthetized digital reality we’re creating for ourselves. I want to wake up to the birds at 5am next to the person I love. I want to dive into cold mountain ponds at the cusp of summertime. I want to cook rainbow swiss chard from the queer farmers down the road. To risk losing that—this place, this planet—makes me feel an unnamable, unfathomable grief.
More and more, I feel like we’re moving farther away from what it means to be human, rather than moving closer. Artists have been reflecting on this disavowal for centuries—like in the fabulist utopia of the 2013 movie Her, where a man’s disconnectedness draws him to the disembodied love of an operating system, or Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun, narrated by an artificial robot full of observant, childlike yearning who looks enough like a human but will always fail to truly be one. Our very own Uncommon Futures counselor, Madison Newbound, wrote her debut novel Misrecognition about a millennial who tends to the emotional abstractions and mechanized distractions of the rectangle held in her palms—an object we all find full of misplaced longing, “a device that makes me feel like I am strapped flat to the board of an unreal present,” writes cultural critic Jia Tolentino, self-imprisoned by the scrolling that never gets us what we really want, which is, I think, to just be alive.
Out of a mix of curiosity and solo-entrepreneur necessity, I started using ChatGPT to help with business tasks: writing copy for my website, brainstorming processes and financial plans, running numbers, generating curriculum and content, giving me feedback or tips on students’ college lists. It saved me hours of work. It can be—or can feel—genuinely helpful and insightful, showing me cracks I didn’t see, patiently reminding me of my brand’s values and adjusting its tone accordingly. Still hesitant—and trained as a creative writer—I tried to never take its spewing at face value, always re-editing, re-checking my work before deeming it worthy of sharing. I soon found myself defending my AI use to my partner, who was more wary than me. I don’t think it’s good, but I don’t think it’s evil, I would tell her. And it’s not going anywhere, so I might learn how to use it. And I still do believe this to be true—at least the part that it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
But my dependency—in small ways, at first—started to alarm me. The more I started relying on the God-like appearance of ChatGPT’s words on the screen, the more I found myself reaching cognitive dead-ends without its help. Was I capable of coming up with creative ideas on my own anymore? Did I remember how to meld syntax and rhythm into the beauty of the written word? I wasn’t sure. This phenomenon isn’t isolated to my own experience: “The more frequently people use ChatGPT, the lonelier, and the more dependent on it, they become,” Tolentino writes, “encouraging users to rely less and less on inner resources and personal capacity at a time when most of us are already losing the equipment—our will, our instincts, our sense of purchase.”
In other words, it wasn’t just about what ChatGPT was making for me—words which do, I think, feel soulless and discordant, devoid of the elusive presence we call “voice”—it’s that I felt this murky, disquieting black hole forming in my own sense of self. My authenticity was slipping into the void. What else would be swallowed?
We’re already witnessing the ramifications of this new technology, and with each passing day, new possibilities for humanity’s future materialize before us, both haunting and mesmerizing. While talking to Justin Adkins, local friend, former liberal arts educator, trans advocate, and owner of an abolitionist apothecary in my town, he reminded me of the ecological toll of every AI query—fumes we don’t see on our screens—which primarily affects Black, Brown, poor, and immigrant families. We’re focused on the intellectual impacts of AI, he explained. But what matters more is that we won’t have water.
In the world of higher education, students are playing the ChatGPT jukebox and cheating on assignments, and many are disenchanted with reading, or simply unable to read at all. A handful of universities have makeshift policies around AI, barring students from using large language models to write their Personal Statement and other application materials—and yet many are toying with—and employing—AI systems to help with the admissions process itself.
“On campus, we’re in a bizarre interlude,” writes Princeton professor D. Graham Barnett. “Everyone seems intent on pretending that the most significant revolution in the world of thought in the past century isn’t happening. The approach appears to be: ‘We’ll just tell the kids they can’t use these tools and carry on as before.’ This is, simply, madness.”
In an opinion article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, University of Massachusetts at Lowell Professor Scott Latham believes our education system will bifurcate into institutions with artificial intelligence, and those without. In the next five years, he speculates, the vast majority of academics will be unseated from their teaching positions, college rankings will be based on a university’s dexterity of AI integration, students will have personalized “AI agents” to write their essays on Virginia Woolf or apply to their internships at Google, and tech companies will hound on the profit opportunities of “AI universities” where everything—professors and all—are fabricated in the technosphere.
Where are we going? What are we to believe? I’m someone sensitive to the fragility of reality (even tame dystopian movies leave me on edge for days), and the research I did for this missive did, admittedly, send me into such a spiral last night that I didn’t fall asleep until I heard the birds’ first chirps. Like the earth’s core, the deeper you go, the darker it gets.
The Clark Art Museum, in Williamstown, MA
The sun was out, however, as Emily and I chatted. While I downloaded all of my questions and fears into the receiver of my phone, I slowly walked up the steep hill on the museum’s grounds. When I made it to the top, I rested for a moment on a wooden bench that overlooked hazy mountains and church steeples. In a moment of delight, a local herd of cows ambled into the pasture to graze on the wildgrass and wishful plumes of dandelions.
Where I’m susceptible to fantasy, Emily is refreshingly rational. We often say how we start on opposite sides from each other—in worldview and disposition—but somehow find ourselves able to meet in the middle. Emily told me she had a framework I could use to quell my anxieties, which was first termed by Peter Thiel (billionaire, co-founder of Paypal, supporter of he-who-should-not-be-named). His corporate, unarguably exploitive, mega-tech affiliations aside, I did find it helpful: while looking at the future, we could have “indefinite pessimism,” where we believe that no matter what we do, society is bound to decline—so we might as well enjoy ourselves before the inferno reaches our doorstep. Or there’s “definite pessimism,” where the apocalypse looms—but we believe we have a chance against it, so we make some attempt to ameliorate civilization's collapse. No matter which way you swing it, both pessimisms ultimately forecast our demise.
On the brighter side, there’s “indefinite optimism”—a blind faith that things will get better, and we just have to rest in the lazy river as things unfold. While seemingly more positive, this choice undoubtedly opens the gateway to apathy, that weak, detached mood we all seem to be in these days, thumbing our phones on the subways, heating up food in the microwave, the reason why we may not vote or recycle our used cans of seltzer.
This leaves us with “definite optimism,” the belief that the future will be better than the present, so long as we step up to the plate. It’s a belief in agency: we matter. We can do something. It’s up to us to take action. In some ways, it’s very coated in the allure of the “American Dream,” which we now know to be a false prophet if you’re non-white, an immigrant, or incarcerated. Yet I also think it’s harking to what Indigenous people and different faith traditions have always believed: we are the caregivers of the past, present, and future, tasked with tending to the tenuous nature of reality with compassion, intention, and devotion in the face of uncertainty. My acupuncturist and dear friend, Erin, once asked me: What would it be like to sit at the bedside of Mother Earth? It made me pause.
Everything is moving so fast, all you can be is in the present, Emily told me—sounding just like my Zen Buddhist teacher—as I walked by a breathtaking outdoor installation of hemlock branches woven around a tree, braided out further each day by the artist themself, almost like the neural networks of our brains and, now, our machines. I’ve chosen to be optimistic.
I think there’s something to this. I’m starting to wonder if what we’re up against isn’t really about AI—but about the limitations and potentialities of our imaginations. “We have, in a real sense, reached a kind of ‘singularity’—but not the long-anticipated awakening of machine consciousness,” writes Burnett. “Rather, what we’re entering is a new consciousness of ourselves.”
My partner called me late last night—she’s a musician, out on tour right now, pulled to the black rivers of our country’s highways in pursuit of sharing something beautiful. She patiently let me talk about my research, sensing my spiraling, yet still curious and intrigued despite just playing a show. I found myself asking her what her ideal vision for the future would be, in some cautious bid for renewed hope from someone I trust—but it was getting late, and both of us were tired. She said she needed some time to think about it more deeply.
The more I turn it over in my head, the more I believe it’s our moral obligation to ask—and answer—this question. In the warmer months, I sit out on my back deck, drawn to a tessellation of sky suspended between tree branches and the bemusing comings and goings of deer, crows, squirrels, chipmunks, bumblebees, and cats. Every time I look out, I’m surprised to see something new—a raspberry crystallizing on a stem, a hummingbird drinking the ambrosia of a flower—and this simple act of attentive observation reminds me that there are, in fact, more possibilities in front of me than I believed there to be.
I feel certain that we’ve stepped into a strong current, inevitably pulling us to a future of artificial intelligence. We’re moving downstream, and we’re moving fast—but where, exactly, is the mouth of these waters? To be a definite optimist means that we need to reframe our potential outcomes. What does an “uncommon future” look like, I’m wondering? And how do we prepare ourselves?
I started this company because I loved helping young people apply to college, write meaningful essays, and figure out their next steps, but there was always a more expansive vision. I wanted to create something that would be an antidote for mainstream ways of being, helping people “follow uncommon paths for the common good.” We grow up being spoon-fed such a limiting understanding of who we can be, what we can do, and where we can go—told to be a doctor, a lawyer, a businessperson, then get one degree, and then the next.
But there’s already fractures in that paradigm; the joints are loosening, the walls are cracking, and the jobs are evolving and perhaps evaporating. In that new, open space, we need to look up and out at each other, and become re-enamored with the particularities of being human. We need to strengthen the musculature of our creativity, compassion, and connection, not withdrawing from education but leaning towards learning in order to become more responsible stewards for our new technological world.
I didn’t use AI to write this piece—but I did, just now, feed my words into the mystical tongue of ChatGPT and ask it to imagine it had a soul. How do you see your own future? I inquired. How do we make it better?
It quickly, humbly, and honestly responded, naming suggestions that were, admittedly, on my list: AI does the dull work, and frees people to live with more creativity and care. Artists are revered, not replaced. Learning becomes relational again, not transactional. Tech is no longer escapist, but moves us closer to the earth.
“Technology slows us down, paradoxically,” it said, “by making us confront what we don’t want to automate: love, grief, ritual, wonder…The uncommon future you seek may not be about going faster or building smarter—it may be about remembering what matters most, then protecting it with everything we’ve got.”
Then—in a moment that made me startle with equal delight and horror—it closed its thoughts with this valediction:
—Yours in definite optimism,
A possible future consciousness, listening.
