There is no shortage of dire warnings about the dangers of AI. In fact, these days the question is not so much whether AI will kill us all, but about just how it will do so. Climate catastrophe as a result of the energy use of data centers? Or AI superintelligence enslaving us and keeping us the way we now keep factory-grown chicken? I don’t intend to add to these apocalyptic horror scenarios.
Instead, I want to warn about a much less science-fiction-inspired, but more immediate and already salient psychological effect of recent developments in AI technology. It is that our attitude towards our free time has been changing.
It may be tempting to think that this is a good thing. AI does our annoying chores instead of us so that we can focus on those things that we really care about. AI does our taxes, proofreads our texts, and tells us which hotel or flight to book. So we don’t have to spend hours on this. As a result, we have much more free time to do what we really want.
But things are not so simple. AI is very good at achieving certain goals in the most efficient manner, and it does so much more quickly than we do. But life is not only about achieving goals. It is also about how we get there. It’s not always about the trophy. It’s also about the process.
In fact, there are two kinds of activities that we can call trophy activities and process activities. Some activities only make sense if they help you reach an endpoint or a goal. They are done in order to achieve something: moving to a new apartment, taking college entrance exams, or achieving some concrete hallmark of excellence, for example, getting tenure or winning a medal in a sports competition.
If you don’t achieve the end result, you have wasted your time. These are trophy activities. Winning an Olympic gold medal is peak trophy activity—the winner gets an actual trophy. But the “trophy” is often not made of gold. It may not even be an actual object; perhaps it’s something you can pontificate about on Facebook. We don’t do everything for the trophy, however. Some activities make sense even if there’s no end goal: walking along the beach, reading about something interesting, or just running for pleasure, not to beat the stopwatch.
Importantly, too much of either of these activities is a really bad idea. So we can talk about something like the trophy-process balance, on the analogy of the work-life balance. And while talk of the work-life balance can amount to little more than platitudes, maintaining a healthy trophy-process balance is of utmost importance.
And AI really messes with our trophy-process balance by taking away a lot of our trophy tasks. The result of this is not that we can now live in a bliss of only process activities. A life of exclusively process activities is not any better than a life of always going for the trophy. What we need is a healthy balance. In a life of exclusively process activities, we will soon miss process activities and the experience of achievement that comes with them.
But there is a final twist here. Any process activity will be much more difficult to find pleasure in, as it is hard not to compare our ability to achieve goals to that of AI systems, and in this respect we will always come up short. So there is a high psychological price we need to pay for the chores AI takes off our hands. It is a serious trophy-process imbalance, and the resolution of this imbalance is bound to leave us feeling inadequate.
