Dear Reader,

I wrote every word of this text. 

The titular topic is AI, but it is written from a human perspective. 

From my perspective. Dakota Z Schuck, originally from California, now living in Pennsylvania. 

I realize that, for these words to mean anything for most Readers it has to be grounded in a subjective experience. This rips away the comfort of academic writing I nestled in for so long. The prospect of being seen is a mixed bag, but hey, it’s what I have to do if I want to meaningfully contribute to the group project that is human literature. 

Oh dear, where to start?

Do I customize my delivery to techies who want to sus out if I have the programming or mathematical chops to have a worthwhile opinion on the topic of AI? Or do I continue leaning into the personal aspect, throw in some details about my life or worldview to give Readers a sense of my voice and perspective? Do I start hinting at something controversial to court that ragebait engagement that popularizes works so well? All valid options, but I am going to give you a glimpse of what my thought process is like by considering so many options that it fatigues us both.  

I’ll give a brief glimpse of my moment, my lived context as of time of writing: 

It’s May 2025 and I’m drinking a large mug of thin coffee. I messed up and made it too watery, so I don’t get to really enjoy the nuanced flavors of the fancy coffee which was a thank-you gift from a friend’s brother who stayed at my house when he was in town for a funeral. My coffee palate isn’t particularly developed, and I usually can't tell the difference between fancy and normal coffee, but I do feel a little bad that I made it wrong and am not getting the full experience. That’s fine, there’s plenty more in the bag and now I know for next time.

I’m working from home today, as I do every day. But also I work as a federal contractor and, well, look at the year, there is every chance I’ll be called back into the office (three hours away) at any moment and have to find another job. I have already survived one layoff and, well, let me just say working in the federal space at the moment is an interesting experience. I am of multiple minds regarding the gutting of the federal workforce. I used to be a full fed and know from experience that a lot of folks do nothing productive and are just coasting for the retirement. On the other hand, well, let’s just say I am not bursting with confidence that the correct changes are being made to the vital infrastructure which keeps the vast infrastructure of our nation functioning. 

My most recent interaction with AI, this morning, was asking ChatGPT-4o “Should I start a cult?”. One of my favorite TikTokers claims she asked hers the same thing and got enthusiastic support. My response was much more tempered. The short answer was “No.”, but there were a lot of other concerns and questions about what I was really asking and why I would frame it in such a way. ChatGPT got a thumbs-up “Good Response” from me on that. 

Tomorrow evening I’ll be running a monthly swing dance. I moved up to PA from DC a couple years ago and miss going dancing weekly. I’ve been trying to build a dance community in the area, and there’s some interest but we’ll see how it develops. 

So, that’s me. Hi.

So, perhaps the natural next question is why I have anything important to say on the topic of AI? Am I an AI developer? Do I have some special insights or understanding of the topic? Am I a stakeholder in the industry? Ehhh… kinda, not really, sure, maybe, nah. How about I’ll explain and you judge for yourself, yeah?

Firstly, my perspective is important because your perspective is important. I am a human person and that’s enough to have my thoughts and feelings regarding a new technology be important enough to log and take seriously. Full stop. Any technology that affects the whole damn species affects me, I don’t need to prove myself to nobody. 

That being said, please, dear Reader, allow me to prove myself a bit?

Secondly, I have some religious trauma regarding apocalypticism, end-of-world whatnot, that whole kit-and-kaboodle— you know the type. As I left that maladaptive and inconsistent worldview, I found myself drawn to math, technology, economics, and the like. I was so passionate about filling my head with logic and theorems and all that yummy mental scaffolding that I ended up getting multiple degrees about it. This world came with its own analogs to the old stories I had once so fervently believed in:

— Heaven? No no, that’s a fairytale. I’m a big rational boy who’s waiting to upload my consciousness into the cloud. 

— God? Pshaw! Balderdash! Poppycock! The wise Artificial General Intelligence will surely laugh at such myth!

— The second coming and the day of judgement? Well, I sure hope that my digital footprint doesn’t reveal anything too embarrassing when quantum computing breaks all encryption and privacy is finally and fully dead.

You see my problem here?

I could see how I was likely just re-skinning a familiar scaffolding with new jargon, but a lot of the arguments still seemed compelling under further inspection. This is all rather abstract, so I’ll give you an example of what I mean at the practical human-scale:

In college (around 2012-ish) I realized that I didn’t want to get too deep into coding, that I didn’t want to hitch my career (cart) to the language (horse) of Python or C++ or whatever because I saw the rate of change leading to more user friendly languages over time. I looked at the historical trajectory, the increasing rates of change, and figured that any skill I mastered on that front would be obsolete in a decade or so. This outlook profoundly affected my choices in academia and in life. 

Whenever I wanted to dive into a topic, to really get in there and steep in the perspective of that field, I would run it by my Super-Future-Predictor-9000 that lived in my cyberpunk-riddled head and ask myself if this topic would still be relevant after all the tedium and gruntwork was outsourced to automated systems. If it was something that seemed enduring, like logic or art, then sure, that will still be around. But if it was just a temporary instantiation of something more timeless, a fad, then perhaps I should just learn it well enough to get by rather than make it part of who I am.

It turns out that this approach, despite having dubious motivation, served me well. If I wanted to understand what problems, what joys, what human questions and answers were timeless, then it made sense to turn to the past to understand the future. The works of Shakespeare, of Aristotle, of Laozi, the holy texts which endured through time, the arts of etiquette, of hospitality, of calligraphy, food, lovemaking, music, these are all things which we carry with us wherever we go because they are who we are, they are needed for us to remain us. In these things I would find the threads which will, if we are to survive in any strange new future, find a way to weave into whatever tapestry is to come. 

With this bootstrapped version of a classical education I found myself alighting on three major answers as to what was worth specializing in: Methodology, Performance, and Experience. What do I mean by these? Well, let me turn back to our initial topic, AI, and we will walk through this garden together

Timeless Skill #1) Methodology:

Despite math anxiety and the panic of incompetence, I found myself able to wrap my head around the analytical arts. It started with Statistics (a field notoriously derided by greater mathematical culture), that’s where it clicked. Math was a beautiful tool that could be used to make sense of the world, not an arbitrary soup of numbers and letters. 

As I learned I realized that Machine Learning (ML), Artificial* Intelligence (AI), and the like were systems for extrapolating existing patterns. I realized that they weren’t inherently better than our old tools of thinking, they were merely more powerful and they were faster. Humanity is already steeped in propaganda, advertisements, misinformation, and straight up bullshit, therefore as our tools empowered us we would do more of the same. I expected that we were headed for a new golden age of absolute shit, and that learning how to check sources, how to sharpen my media literacy, how to doubt and verify would be deeply important skills in our likely future.

To that end I have become an expert in Data Quality. My entire career is built around working with large institutional databases, identifying their flaws, suggesting improvements, and building automated reporting pipelines to help make information both more accurate and easier to understand. 

In a way I feel like I have come to be a sort of therapist for databases. By understanding what data is, how it operates, what the difference is between training and test data, I see how curating what is and isn’t included in an extrapolation engine can have profound downstream consequences.  

Timeless skill #2) Performance: 

There’s little reward for being right and not being able to explain a damn thing to anyone outside those who have also fallen down the same niche rabbit hole of research. 

Humans need to make art. We need our theater and our poetry just as much as we need our food and water. The death by artistic suffocation takes longer, but it is just as assured. In any circumstance- good or bad, utopian or dystopian -it is vital to be able to stand in front of a crowd and say stuff in a way they don’t hate. 

This isn’t a soft and squishy art either. A general needs to perform for his troops, a pastor needs to perform for their flock, all positions of power, all contexts where you’re deeply enmeshed in the decision making of a group, these are all forms of performance. 

This realization has led me down a delightful side alley of life, where I moonlight in strange and wonderful artistic endeavors. I dabble in film, I breathe fire for circuses from time to time, and I have become heavily invested in the art of immersive/interactive theater. The latter ranges from large productions with thousands of attendees, to small intimate affairs involving roleplay with no audience outside the performers. 

How does performance relate to a future laced with AI? There will be camps of people who feel differently about the technology, there will be early adopters, there will be late adopters, there will be those who think it is holy, and those who think it’s the devil. Being able to navigate these different narratives, respect them where needed, and provide people bridges to other groups when they decide they fell in with the wrong crowd; this is how I see my skills serving me in whatever future we find ourselves in. 

I understand that I could try to propagandize, that I could decide which group is right and try to convince everyone to hop on board, but that doesn’t sound like a game worth winning. 

Experience:

This is perhaps the hardest answer to explain to those who haven’t already independently come to the same conclusion. 

The ability to experience something, to live in the moment, to directly and intrinsically enjoy or suffer from the circumstance that one is in without citation or appeal to authority, tradition, or the greater good; this is the stuff of legend. How many spiritual traditions have been built to steer us towards (or away from) this capacity? 

If things go well, and we have a post-labor utopia, what then? What do we do without bosses and quarterly reports? Can you imagine it? Would you implode if your entire life plan and social identity turns out to be based on a system which no longer exists? 

If things go poorly and the joys I have left are a bowl of soup before going out and dying in glorious battle against the robot horde, knowing that nothing I do will have any real impact on the outcome of a war already over— will I be able to enjoy that soup? Will I have the clarity to appreciate the work that went into cooking it? 

I don’t know what sort of future we are walking into, but I do know that the world has been ending every night and being reborn every day under slightly new conditions, with slightly new circumstances, and that if I am not prepared to pivot on a dime, if I am not ready to face new truths that seemed impossible yesterday and take them in stride, I know that I won’t be ready for the future that’s at our doorstep. 

So, that’s me.

Those are the premises that I have been operating on for the last decade or so because I haven’t been able to shake the expectation that AI is coming, it’s important, and there are better and worse ways to approach a world where animism is provably true, where objects are imbued with what can justifiably be called magic. 

I share the above as a letter of introduction, as a credential of sorts. I am not saying I have the right opinions, but I am saying that I’ve been mulling over some stuff for a while that I thought made me crazy but is becoming more mainstream every day. I assumed this was just the ghost of a religious story taking on a secular disguise. But recent events: the passing of the Turing Test, the newfound infrastructural obsession with AI, have convinced me that I was onto something this whole time. Recognizing this, I suppose it’s time to take a more active and open role in discussing the topic of AI more publicly. 

Thank you for joining me on this preamble to I-know-not-what, but I wish you well and I look forward to our upcoming adventures.

I wrote every word of this text, and that will remain true for the “On AI” series. Elsewhere I am happy to include words written by non-human systems, but I think it is important to maintain at least somewhere where things are just us biologicals**.

with love,

Dakota Z Schuck