Thank you for this essay. Like so much of your writing, it stayed with me long after I finished reading it.
I found myself nodding in agreement as you described our longing for the awkward, idiosyncratic human voice. I share your concern that a culture obsessed with optimization can lose sight of what actually draws us toward one another. The trembling, unfinished places are often where the deepest connection is found.
At the same time, I wanted to offer another perspective born from my own experience.
Over the past several years, I have been advocating for my son. That advocacy has required navigating educational, medical, and legal systems while reading thousands of pages of reports, policies, legislation, research, and correspondence. Like many parents, I did not have access to advocates, lawyers, or researchers. I had determination, but not the resources that many institutions take for granted.
AI became, for me, not a replacement for thinking, but an equalizer. It didn’t tell me what mattered. It couldn’t know my son. It couldn’t discern the gap between institutional claims that his needs were being met and the reality I had witnessed over years of raising him. Those judgments remained deeply and irreducibly human.
What it could do was help me organize complexity, clarify my thinking, synthesize information, and express ideas with greater precision. It gave me access to capabilities that would otherwise have required expertise or financial resources beyond my reach.
The advocacy, the grief, the love, the discernment, the persistence, all of those remained profoundly human. The tool simply helped me carry a weight that had become too great for one person alone.
Reading your essay, I wondered whether there is another story to tell alongside the one about optimization. Perhaps the question is not the tool itself, but how we choose to relate to it. Like any powerful technology, AI can be used in ways that diminish our humanity or in ways that expand it. I think of the growing work in human-centred, trustworthy AI, which asks not simply whether AI should be used, but how it can be designed and governed to strengthen human agency, equity, and relationships. That feels like a profoundly human question.
Your essay ends with the hope that we might “do our messy part to save what we love.” That line resonated deeply with me. I don’t see AI as being in opposition to that hope. Used wisely, I think it can sometimes help ordinary people do exactly that.
Thank you for continuing to write in ways that invite reflection rather than certainty. I appreciate your willingness to hold tensions instead of resolving them too quickly. This essay has become one more tension I will continue to carry with me.
Thank you so much for pouring nuance, with so much care, into the mix Jess- and for sharing so openly about how it's helped you advocate for your son. For families, organizations and communities who are marginalized by bigger capital or unequal systems, AI, if used with discernment, can be very helpful.
How we talk about it matters too. The use of AI doesn't easily fit into an either/or, and yet the conversation around AI use, for obvious reasons, tends to gravitate to either enthusiasm or hell-bent no's. I think this binary hides the kind of trouble and helpfulness you speak of.
As someone who has also used AI for a different but challenging reason (sifting through complex legislation, policies, submissions, background reports related to mining exploration in a nearby watershed in our town), I understand that my very use of it puts me in the middle of a great contradiction. That is: I deeply care about environmental and ecological sustainability but the very use of AI (and the carbon emissions it puts out), makes me complicit in the rise of emissions and the proliferation of data centers.
This feels like a good example of trying to get curious about the "conchoidal"- all the ways surprise, slippages, cracks, sideways gestures, and the unseen help us "see" the modern flows and systems our world relies upon (optimization and power over), and invite us into more intimate and imaginative relationship with a world that is remaking itself.
None of this is easy. But I appreciate, even this exchange, which is criss-crossing time zones and care, as we imperfectly wade through our entanglement with a world we love. Thanks so much for taking the time to write. J
Dear Jennifer,
Thank you for this essay. Like so much of your writing, it stayed with me long after I finished reading it.
I found myself nodding in agreement as you described our longing for the awkward, idiosyncratic human voice. I share your concern that a culture obsessed with optimization can lose sight of what actually draws us toward one another. The trembling, unfinished places are often where the deepest connection is found.
At the same time, I wanted to offer another perspective born from my own experience.
Over the past several years, I have been advocating for my son. That advocacy has required navigating educational, medical, and legal systems while reading thousands of pages of reports, policies, legislation, research, and correspondence. Like many parents, I did not have access to advocates, lawyers, or researchers. I had determination, but not the resources that many institutions take for granted.
AI became, for me, not a replacement for thinking, but an equalizer. It didn’t tell me what mattered. It couldn’t know my son. It couldn’t discern the gap between institutional claims that his needs were being met and the reality I had witnessed over years of raising him. Those judgments remained deeply and irreducibly human.
What it could do was help me organize complexity, clarify my thinking, synthesize information, and express ideas with greater precision. It gave me access to capabilities that would otherwise have required expertise or financial resources beyond my reach.
The advocacy, the grief, the love, the discernment, the persistence, all of those remained profoundly human. The tool simply helped me carry a weight that had become too great for one person alone.
Reading your essay, I wondered whether there is another story to tell alongside the one about optimization. Perhaps the question is not the tool itself, but how we choose to relate to it. Like any powerful technology, AI can be used in ways that diminish our humanity or in ways that expand it. I think of the growing work in human-centred, trustworthy AI, which asks not simply whether AI should be used, but how it can be designed and governed to strengthen human agency, equity, and relationships. That feels like a profoundly human question.
Your essay ends with the hope that we might “do our messy part to save what we love.” That line resonated deeply with me. I don’t see AI as being in opposition to that hope. Used wisely, I think it can sometimes help ordinary people do exactly that.
Thank you for continuing to write in ways that invite reflection rather than certainty. I appreciate your willingness to hold tensions instead of resolving them too quickly. This essay has become one more tension I will continue to carry with me.
With gratitude,
Jess
Thank you so much for pouring nuance, with so much care, into the mix Jess- and for sharing so openly about how it's helped you advocate for your son. For families, organizations and communities who are marginalized by bigger capital or unequal systems, AI, if used with discernment, can be very helpful.
How we talk about it matters too. The use of AI doesn't easily fit into an either/or, and yet the conversation around AI use, for obvious reasons, tends to gravitate to either enthusiasm or hell-bent no's. I think this binary hides the kind of trouble and helpfulness you speak of.
As someone who has also used AI for a different but challenging reason (sifting through complex legislation, policies, submissions, background reports related to mining exploration in a nearby watershed in our town), I understand that my very use of it puts me in the middle of a great contradiction. That is: I deeply care about environmental and ecological sustainability but the very use of AI (and the carbon emissions it puts out), makes me complicit in the rise of emissions and the proliferation of data centers.
This feels like a good example of trying to get curious about the "conchoidal"- all the ways surprise, slippages, cracks, sideways gestures, and the unseen help us "see" the modern flows and systems our world relies upon (optimization and power over), and invite us into more intimate and imaginative relationship with a world that is remaking itself.
None of this is easy. But I appreciate, even this exchange, which is criss-crossing time zones and care, as we imperfectly wade through our entanglement with a world we love. Thanks so much for taking the time to write. J