The Coming Superabundance

One hour into my morning, and already I’ve conversed with three AIs.

First it was Daniel, offering via email to make introductions to hiring managers on my behalf. “I think they’d quite like your profile,” he wrote knowingly.

Next it was Emily, the perky receptionist who picked up when I called an HVAC company to get an estimate on our project. “I’d be happy to arrange that!” she gushed.

Then it was Customer Support for an equipment manufacturer, whose 800 number I called for help in selecting from the 50+ contractors that popped up when I entered my zip code on their website. “You can find a contractor,” the bot informed me, “just by entering your zip code on our website.”

Each of these interactions, to varying degrees, left me feeling dehumanized (there is nothing quite so demeaning as having to answer a robot‘s questions). Yet I can hardly protest companies using AI to field my inquiries because I rely on it to field my own. Claude is my go-to now for help on everything from HVAC projects to bloodwork; I can see asking Claude for help creating and dispatching a digital assistant of my own, so that my bot can talk to everyone else’s bots. Hundreds of exchanges will then populate my inbox at the speed of light, metastasizing into thousands of emails I neither initiated nor solicited, each headlined with a content summary I neither asked for nor find helpful but which I cannot turn off and therefore must waste my non-infinite human time bypassing. Maybe this is an example of the Superabundance we’re told we’ll all be enjoying in the Age of AI.

I am really of two (admittedly inferior) minds about this brave new world and my role in accelerating its arrival. On the one hand, I trust input from AI more than I trust input from humans. As an introvert, I’m also inclined to use apps to avoid conversations with strangers. But on the other hand, I don’t wish to be complicit in training my future overlord, and I want no part of a society where human interaction is the exception rather than the rule. I find it beyond ironic, and utterly terrifying, that we’ve entrusted human society to the most socially maladapted among us (let’s recall why and how 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg wanted to upgrade Harvard’s freshman “face book”). I am morally outraged when moral cretins like Elon Musk pronounce the dominion of AI as “inevitable.” (Really? The trillionaire founder, leader, and chief visionary of SpaceXAI and Grok sees no role for himself, no responsibility in forestalling our subordination and--by his own prognostication--potential extinction??)

Professor Kaveh Madani of the UN says that “everybody has a role to play” in determining how AI reshapes society. Okay. But if, like me, you suspect you are no match for Super Intelligence, you might wonder what exactly we non-trillionaire mortals should be doing. Here’s what Claude suggests:

·      Push for transparency requirements (safety evaluations, incident reporting) from companies and lawmakers;

·      Support independent, well-resourced institutions (academic, nonprofit, government) capable of auditing AI systems rather than relying solely on self-reporting by the companies building them;

·      Stay informed about specific, concrete decisions (e.g., autonomous weapons authorization, critical infrastructure AI integration) rather than only engaging with the abstract "will AI take over" framing — the gradual-disempowerment concern is often more about accumulated specific decisions than one dramatic moment;

·      Engage with your own government's AI policy process, since this is genuinely still being shaped and public input affects it.

If you’re as paranoid as I am (and I really think you should be), you are probably thinking: isn’t this a bit like consulting the fox on how to safeguard the henhouse?

We’re going to find out. The real question is: will it be soon enough to forestall the inevitable?

Author’s note: Copilot did not help me write this, though it repeatedly, and I mean repeatedly, tried.