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AI, Human Nature, and the Humans We Want to Be

What do we risk overlooking when we treat AI primarily as a technology problem rather than a social and philosophical one? As AI becomes more capable, what aspects of being human will become even more important to cultivate?

These are a couple of questions I asked Samuel Kimbriel, Founder and Director of Philosophy & Society at Aspen Institute, ahead of his conversation next week with Anthropic’s Jack Clark. His responses, which include the following, are part of a longer interview on the Aspen Institute blog.

We need space to argue about what humans are and what it means to live full, deep, vivacious lives rather than small and cramped ones. The question about AI is whether we are going to be able to find a deep enough visions of human nature, such that the technology ends up fitting and, in fact, facilitating those deepest human capacities.

To make that concrete with regard to education—does AI replace the difficulty of thinking, and the confidence that comes through working through that difficulty? Does it make possible newer modes of challenge in which the restless human capacity for curiosity or judgment can actually grow? Or does it enfeeble our capacities—lulling us into a kind of well-fed slumber in which we don’t actually have to develop such resilience or agency?

I’m really looking forward to this event and will share some stuff here after the talk. In the meantime, go and read our full conversation over on the Aspen Institute site.

All that Friction

There’s a lot of talk these days about friction. There’s an idea that we need annoying, difficult situations in our lives to be better adjusted humans. Our phones, technology, and everything are making us soft. Our devices make it too easy. AI makes it too easy. When everything is too easy, once something is hard or difficult, the brain can’t manage. It gives up.

Friction is good. Waiting in line without looking at your phone is good. Going to college and doing the homework is good. Studying for the exam is good. Reading a long book? Great thing. All this friction makes us smarter because that potato inside our skulls is getting a little workout. Without it, the potato softens and starts growing sprouts. Eventually, it turns into compost.

But here’s the thing. What happens when the whole world feels like friction? Our whole existence is friction. Hiking up the subway stairs, averting your eyes at the guy who looks like he needs mental help. He’s screaming. Hustling to bring your kids to that birthday party. Reading about the layoffs, the people who can’t find jobs. The wars. The incompetence in the government. The anger. All that noise is friction for the mind. Bad friction.

When the potato is overcome with this kind of friction, how do you find the good kind again? That’s where I’m at. In my heart, I know difficult situations make us stronger. I learned resilience and self-reliance on a 30-day hiking trip in Alaska, hiking 20 miles a day above the Arctic Circle. I learned what the body and mind are capable of when they work together.

But these days, with everything going on, this idea of rewilding yourself and embracing friction seems like a luxury. I’m not an optimizer, so I can’t tell you how to get through this, but I can tell you a couple of things I’m doing right now.

Identifying the good friction and separating it from the bad. When it comes down to it, the good friction is voluntary, and the bad friction is foisted on us. We have to make some tasks for ourselves to feel the reward. Maybe it’s making dinner. For me, it usually involves tools and little projects. I spent a year looking at the peeling toe kick in the kitchen of my new apartment and finally did something about it a couple weeks ago. It took two nights to make them all white again. No one else will notice, but it’s not pissing me off anymore and I feel good about myself, like a productive human who can do more than sit on a computer all day. Find the tasks and the projects and do them, no matter how small. I have so much respect for people who are constantly feathering the nest. I get it.

Giving myself permission to take it local. Very local. Turning off NPR. Saying goodbye to the NYT for a bit. Picking up a magazine, but really, looking instead for a book written in a different time. I just read Warlock, which somehow felt like it could have been written yesterday. It made me feel connected to eternal human struggles and foibles, to a man in midlife losing his mind in the best possible way. It also made me laugh and took me to the woods of Michigan and to Key West. I’ll remember that much longer than another article about the reflecting pool in DC.

Sweating it off. If I’m not getting my blood pumping at least three days a week, all bets are off. Long walks don’t count.

These are just blowoff valves, though. The real truth is that when we’re drowning in the kind of friction we feel today, small things won’t fix it. You can’t optimize your way out of it. You just have to hike through it.

Ness is about making and thinking about content strategy, storytelling, and the creative life. If you would like to support this project, please subscribe.

The LA-Based Composter on Burying Stage Fright and Writing Anywhere

A couple of years ago, avid composter Cassandra Marketos buried some shirts in a compost pile, unsure of what would happen. The results were stellar.

Her microbe shirts are these wild, tie-dye-like t-shirts with designs “produced entirely by the naturally-occurring microbial action in a thermophilic compost pile, a celestial-seeming snapshot of what would otherwise be the entirely invisible action of decomposition,” as she says.

To me, these shirts are not just beautiful creations of earthly forces but a genuinely cool and real way to connect compost with fashion and culture, something that’s not easily done.

Along with this project, Cassandra perhaps more notably writes The Rot, a newsletter all about composting, and she just published a book on the same subject called Compost After Reading. In LA, where she lives, she runs a community compost and regularly helps educate students and volunteers.

I admire Cassandra’s commitment to decomposition, but also, she’s an amazing writer who regularly drops knowledge on Substack and LinkedIn about producing good work in this new age of slop and has become a favorite follow for me.

Really excited to have her here for our second NESS interview.

What surprised you about yourself or your work while writing Compost After Reading?

How hard it is to write simple things! My book is ultimately educational in nature, and figuring out the right way to share knowledge with people, so that it resonates for beginners, is actually … really hard! Go figure. (Pay teachers more!!!!)

What have you learned about the conditions you need to do your best work?

In the beginning, I really needed to create maximum psychic space for myself, which was (of course) very irritating for anybody in my life who wanted to spend time with me. I found that I really needed to create days for myself without any obligations, even a looming evening plan could disrupt my workflow during the day, because I just would feel that plan COMING, getting closer and closer.

Everything else could be totally variable, I could work in coffee shops, while the TV was on, around lots of people, or completely alone. I just NEEDED to know I had no reason to be anywhere on any given day but exactly where I was, writing away at my little laptop, for as long as I wanted.

This was only really the case for the beginning part of the process, though, when I was trying to get the general structure and tone of the book into place. As I got my footing under me, and got more and more writing onto the page, it became easier and easier for me to quickly become productive, even in small available windows of time.

When you’re creatively stuck, what do you actually do?

Have patience with myself. The worst thing for writer’s block is to feel stressed about it. I try to remind myself that the stakes of my writing are low. I’m not authoring the great American novel over here, I’m just writing about compost! People reading my stuff are not going to be scrutinizing my sentence structure. They just want to learn stuff. I also try to keep in mind that the writing always comes. Sometimes it does so on its own terms and timeline … but it always comes. I might struggle for a week, or even two weeks! But there WILL eventually be a morning where I wake up and something clicks, and the right way to say something just comes to me, and the work begins to flow again. I can never force it. I just have to maintain my faith that that morning is coming.

What’s something you’ve gotten unusually good at that most people don’t see or wouldn’t know about?

Does it count to say “managing my stage fright”? I don’t know if this is the type of answer this question is after, because the outcome of this effort is (by definition) witnessed by others. But I developed TERRIBLE stage fright at a certain point late in my life, after I moved to LA in my 30s, to the point that I would blush horribly if even called on to speak in a group setting. It was so bizarre and also crippling, and as the publication date for my book neared, I found this fear getting even more exasperated! What the heck. So I started out this year determined to conquer it through exposure therapy, and said “yes” to every speaking opportunity offered to me, resulting in a trial-by-fire of several back-to-back speaking engagements, culminating in my book release party. It was no small feat! But when I was done with it, I had truly come through the thing, and now feel much more confident with public speaking and putting myself out there, in general. I think almost anybody who knows me would be completely shocked to hear I went through this. I definitely don’t strike people as a wallflower.

What’s something you’ve stopped doing that’s made a big difference?

Drinking. I still have the occasional drink, I’m not officially sober, but at some point when I was writing my book, I realized that alcohol really scrambled my senses more than I had ever realized before. (How embarrassing?)

Writing really required maximum use of all my faculties, the work felt physical to me, like I was building muscle. I was working and working on that muscle, and, as a result, I became very acutely aware of every little thing that degraded or enhanced its potential. I think I had this romantic idea that a glass of wine in the evening over the manuscript would result in an inspired writing session, but instead I found that it just… dulled me. My thinking would get blurry and dumb. Even with one glass! So I gave it up in a more complete way, and I’ve never been happier. Bye alcohol!

What’s something you’ve changed your mind about?

This is a tough question for me to answer because I’m currently in an era of “not holding any opinions too strongly.” My 30s were my most argumentative and intense decade to date, and I’m Greek/Italian! So you can only imagine how argumentative and intense that means I was. I’ve really been enjoying a phase of accepting that I don’t really know anything at all, and marinating in the myriad views and perspectives of people around me, working to be interested without judgement, and letting go of my need to be right about everything. We’ll see how long it lasts… but it’s been a really nice break for both my nervous system and (I’m sure) my friends and family.

What’s a piece of work (book, movie, album) that changed how you see the world?

“The Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys, which I read when I was 18. It’s a re-telling of Jane Eyre, from the perspective of the “crazy” woman who lives in the attic. It was the first time I understood that history is written, and how narratives are created and shape our perception of reality and truth. I had a great teacher who put this book in my hands, and gave me the learning to grapple with it. Thankful to him every day. (Pay teachers more!!!!)

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This Week’s Flags

• Something for the creative dads out there via Tim Curio.

• Top-tier post from …

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Ness is about making and thinking about content strategy, storytelling, and the creative life. If you would like to support this project, please subscribe.

The Denim Founder on Slow Progress and How Creativity is Iterative

Eric Steffen founded FITTED Underground in 2014, making the jeans and building his brand from scratch. I met him around that time and …

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NESS is about making and thinking about content strategy, storytelling, and the creative life. A huge thank you to all who have stepped into the paid membership tier! If you would like to support this project, please subscribe.

Quick Hits

• Extremely telling (and satisfying), that Apple is embracing handmade more than almost any brand right now.

• The clippin…

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My take is Kareem Rahma is the new Anthony Bourdain.

I’ve been wrong about a lot of this. Over the last few months in this newsletter, I’ve been mulling ove…

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Ness is about making and thinking about content strategy, storytelling, and the creative life. It’s free for now. Someday, it will earn its keep. To support this project, please consider subscribing.

Quick Hits

• The music video format can still thrive. Next level talent and choreography here in this Yung Lean jag.

• The absence of Paul McCartney on the New Y…

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Ness is about making and thinking about content strategy, storytelling, and the creative life. It’s free for now. Someday, it will earn its keep. To support this project, please consider subscribing.

Brands: Music Is Your Secret Weapon. Stop Screwing the People Who Make It.

A UK gym switched from music by real musicians to a service that plays cover songs…

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Ness is about making and thinking about content strategy, storytelling, and the creative life. It’s free for now. Someday, it will earn its keep. To support this project, please consider subscribing.

There’s a Method to Getting Better at Things

For the first time in years, I’ve got calluses on my fingers. Anyone who plays guitar, especially steel-string, …

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Quick Hits

• I’ve been enjoying watching the Long Way series in reverse chronological order. Something abou…

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Two giant cultural events last week: Coachella and the Masters. Both generated a lot of chatter online, but not about the performances or the golf. About th…

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Ness is about making and thinking about content strategy, storytelling, and the creative life. It’s free for now. Someday, it will earn its keep. To support this project, please consider subscribing.

Let’s look at John Grisham for a second.

The JohnGPT summary of Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act goes something like this:

• Create work that you love fully, and …

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How Do You Know When You’re Done?

I’ve been thinking about endings.

How do you know when a project is finished? How do you know when it’s fully baked, that you’ve taken it as far as yo…

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Listers

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Ness is about making and thinking about content strategy, storytelling, and the creative life. It’s free for now. Someday, it will earn its keep. To support this project, please consider subscribing.

Food Was Never a Religion

That new episode of Chef’s Table took a dark turn.

Seriously, this video of hotshot Chef René Redzepi apologizing to his staff for a…

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Ness is about making and thinking about content strategy, storytelling, and the creative life. It’s free for now. Someday, it will earn its keep. To support this project, please consider subscribing.

Four things spotted this week that are worth your time.

• “Half of Silicon Valley talks about taste now the way sommelier hobbyists talk about terroir.” Taste …

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Ness is about making and thinking about content strategy, storytelling, and the creative life. It’s free for now. Someday, it will earn its keep. To support this project, please consider subscribing.

That Time Cormac McCarthy Went On Oprah

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Ness is about making and thinking about content strategy, storytelling, and the creative life. It’s free for now. Someday, it will earn its keep. To support this project, please consider subscribing.

Introducing Flags

Flags is simple: Three things spotted this week worth your time.

• Architectural Digest goes inside the Hotel Chelsea. Even if this feels a ta…

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Ness is about making and thinking about content strategy, storytelling, and the creative life. It’s free for now. Someday, it will earn its keep.

Ask Anything: Define Speculation

Two weeks ago, this ominous post about the looming impacts of AI sent me and a lot of others into a spiral. Loss of jobs. Economic collapse. The whole thing. Then, days later, it…

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Ness is about making and thinking about content strategy, storytelling, and the creative life. It’s free for now. Someday, it will earn its keep.

The thing about managing creatives in the age of AI

If you manage creative people right now, your job matters more than it has in years.

AI is changing workflows, expectations, and career paths/trajectories faste…

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