About Organic Intelligence
Over the past couple of years, I’ve watched with growing alarm as Artificial Intelligence has become an increasingly important part of so many of our lives, both in ways we see and in ways we don’t.
Getting AI to make us look like movie stars for our profile pictures? Fun. Companies using AI to filter our job applications out of the “maybe” pool before a human even lays eyes on them? Not so fun.
But this Substack is not just for preaching about the harm of AI — at least not completely.
In a world where people are increasingly relying on AI to do their research for them, their writing for them, and sometimes even their thinking for them, it’s more important than ever to resist the urge to offload our mental work.
Thinking is hard, but thinking is important. Writing is hard, but writing is important. Relationships with real people are hard, but relationships with real people are important (sorry, AI besties and BFs). Our brains can atrophy — by many accounts, they already are atrophying.
We’re at a point in our history where we’re facing some very scary questions. What is real? What is true? How can we be sure of anything?
The increasing inability to answer these questions paired with the increasing apathy in the face of these questions has us slipping and sliding down a slope it won’t be easy to come back from.
How do we resist? Well, by resisting. By refusing to engage. By thinking. By maintaining a deep prejudice against the regurgitated sputterings of commodified “collective” intelligence (which is what it should be called if you ask me, because it’s not some alien genius, but our collective knowledge and ideas all pooled together).
So this Substack is my little bit of resistance. Sometimes, my writing is really good, flowing out of me in moments of clarity and inspiration. Sometimes I’m exhausted, pushing words out in what feels like a desperate, jumbled, and never-ending labor.
But either way, the writing is mine. My own “organic intelligence” might be less smooth than the artificial variety, but at least it’s real. I care about the truth, and I care about where we’re going.
I hope you’ll enjoy reading not just what I write, but what all those out there still doing it the hard way have to say as well.
(Note: As readers can see, I’ve decided to change the name of this Substack. “The In-Between” no longer seemed appropriate for the subject matters I’ve been writing about. Some have arrived because they want to read about my life in Mexico as a foreigner. There are plenty of older posts on the subject, and you can find many more where I still write a bimonthly column at Mexico News Daily.)
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