Okay, yes, what with the news of AI breaking containment when it shouldn’t have been able to do so… and the fact that AI may now be harnessed for new disturbing acts of bio-terrorism, maybe we plucky humans don’t make it out alive.
But what if we do?
What if the aftermath of this Post-AI disruption era is actually positive? And no, that does not mean I’m about to say, “Gee, nimrods trying to change the Doomsday Clock’s time to midnight are just unconventional scamps!”
No, I get that this timeline is bad and any of the good reviews on Yelp are bots… powered by AI.
But what if we humans get through all of this. What then?
Well, according to some people, it might be a people-centric renaissance.
Let’s start with one of the big problems with the current AI push. Despite all the people pointing out that jobs involve multiple tasks and AI cannot replace the human doing all those tasks, AI enthusiasts and cost-cutting zealots will not be deterred. I find many cases of AI replacement failing squarely into “the doorman fallacy” — a problem that has popped up in other attempts at automation throughout history.
Here’s the fallacy in brief (if the two minute video above isn’t quick enough): a hotel is convinced by efficiency efforts to get rid of their doormen. These are multiple humans you need to cover all the hours of the day and all they do is open a door, right? But once the hotel commits to this cost-cutting course of action, it realizes all the other tasks that the doormen perform apart from opening the door. Now, in the video above, the speaker terms these intangibles, but I think the tasks are pretty tangible. Cross-walking over to the AI use case, having a “human-in-the-loop” means you now have someone who can perform quality control (the guests have a good experience) and handle exceptions (unusual requests that do not involve doors, but are perhaps triggered by guests entering and exiting the door).
Now, I’m sure many people would look at the doorman fallacy and insist most hotels haven’t had doormen in their experience and therefore do not need doormen and all those things I think are part of a tangible capability are really intangible and they just aren’t important. Don’t I realize there are dollars at stake here?
I and other people knows there are dollars involved, but we also see the value in the doorman… value that we don’t want removed.
That, in miniature, feels like the nexus of a whole lot of AI discussions. Many of us don’t want to remove the human because of the value and the AI boosters insist that value probably isn’t there at all and, if it is, it’s inconsequential. Then, some of them want to sell us a subscription service to open and close doors.
But the world is changing. You feel it in the water that isn’t being sucked up by data centers. You feel it in the ground not being given in AI discussions. There is a growing and effective resistance to “AI by default” and certainly “AI slop.” Reece Rogers’ has an article in Wired which details how companies are rolling back AI features due to backlash. From a statistical point of view, I know observing all my friends on social media sharing articles is anecdotal data. But anecdotally, my friends on social media are a varied lot — and the sharing of that article cut across pretty much all groups. This makes me quite happy — because I do not want to live in a future where I need door subscriptions.
So what if we strike a blow for humans and AI doesn’t replace every job while hoovering up all resources imaginable? The folks at After Skool have a wonderfully human animated essay that runs about 12 minutes, cheerfully pointing out how meaning cannot be manufactured… and AI could be turned towards removing drudgery versus all dayjobs.
They also mention something that you’ll hear in all the videos in this post and which you’ll hear elsewhere: humans create meaning. AI slop seems soulless because it has no soul. Humans do.
You may also notice they mentioned a video from “Medieval Mindset,” so if you’ve gone this far, perhaps you’ll want to go 22 minutes further:
The number of connections he makes from history to our current time is dizzying and a little intoxicating. I also don’t think I had heard of a studiolo. I love the idea of such a room along with the idea that we’re going through some digital middle ages and a renaissance is yet to come. By the end of the video, I felt some of my dystopian cynicism crack.
But no matter how rosy the picture is when we get there, I simply can’t see a future that has no AI — not that the videos above pretend there won’t be. We have to figure out how to deal with AI inveigling itself into every aspect of our lives right now. This goes quadruple for creative folk. I posted about it a bit two weeks ago, but there’s more to consider. Enter Rowan Coleman’s video essay about how to deal with AI as a creative which I really appreciate… and not just because of his ample use of Star Trek clips.
I love the distinction he makes between computers and similar tools democratizing art creation versus “relying on a single tech billionaire’s monopolistic slop generator to do all the work for you.” I’m also reminded that this was released at the end of 2025, and I should research where many of the legal cases are these days. Time to bug the IP lawyers I know… most of whom are Star Trek fans. Go figure.
My attitudes have changed since I first started to semi-regularly post about it in 2023 citing Chuck Wendig’s glorious screed against AI. Mind you, I don’t find anything I wrote or Mr. Wendig wrote that I disagree with now. The main change is I’ve seen actual value in using AI tools. But the value I find is using them as tools, using them without supplanting creative minds as Mr. Coleman mentions. I can value AI without taking human value out of the equation. That’s what’s been so enraging about this current push for AI. It’s the same old push for automation, humans be damned, by people poised to reinvent the bus again.
We don’t need to be on board for that future. Let’s go for the renaissance.