It is likely that you have heard from an early age that “seeing is believing.” 

As life goes on, it becomes clear that that advice is only partly effective. There are many things in this world that can be true even if we cannot see that they are true. That human beings need air to breathe is just one example of the entire tantalizing set of possibilities out there, though it is a trivial one.

What is not trivial, though, is what I discovered today, which is that AI could very well, in a serious way, end up replacing us, the human race. 

It started with my first trial of core work. Now I had an awareness that AI could do something that human beings might want to do, but I’d always thought of myself as being there to prompt things. This is understandable, and it is par for the course when we use ChatGPT or any sort of bot. You still have to write the prompt, and you still have to get everything done.

Today I experienced a sea change as Claude not just wrote things for me but literally did some of the following actions (non-exhaustively):

1. First, it navigated Google Docs, opened up multiple sub-tabs, followed the results of delivering on a prompt which I had created across twelve separate tabs, navigating, screenshotting, and ultimately completing a task of creating a compilation of pieces, ensuring that every single one of them followed the required formatting that I had set out for it.

2. Next, it proceeded to navigate into my WordPress dashboard and then, upon having populated all of the information correctly in the applications Docs connector, proceeded to then copy that all out into a set of pages, titling everything correctly as per my instructions to create 12 separate page posts that followed my instructions, before copying the URLs that I needed as part of a sequence of actions that I could not imagine having taken so quickly.

If it was just that, it would have already been impressive, but this also helped me in another way. It helped me assemble a full DJ set compiling tracks that I would want to play.

Not only that, it even autonomously searched SoundCloud on my behalf before locating links to mixes that were explicitly downloadable. It went through every single one of the gateways on its own by clicking through the whole sea of different actions that SoundCloud creators always want you to take part in. Whether to like their song, follow them on SoundCloud, follow them on Spotify, or any number of other actions necessary to finally get to the end of the wall. Claude did every single one of those things and proceeded to download the tracks to my computer.

Now it might seem that this is very seemingly mundane, but really it explains how I am able to just be out and about right now, completely secure in the awareness that my time is actually being bought back in a very real way that I could never have imagined. Even that was just the beginning. 

Truly, seeing is believing, and now I see, and now I believe. What I once imagined as just a mere possibility suddenly and drastically came into reality. Before I knew it, I realized, perhaps a little later than others, that I was living in a new world, filled now with knowledge of that new world that I cannot liberate for myself anymore.

It’s fascinating to see, but frankly, it is also a little terrifying to see it all in action, to genuinely see complex and non-trivial actions get carried out in this way. Where exactly all of this is going is hard to say, but what’s clear to me is that it appears that the universe has showed me something new and unexpected, and it has done so for a reason. It will not behoove me, nor would it be coming of me, to ignore that change and allow things to just be business as usual.

I’ll be honest: I did not expect this post to unsettle me. I sat down to do something simple, ask an AI to write a blog post about the experience of writing a blog post with AI, and somewhere between the first paragraph and the last, I stopped feeling like I was supervising a tool and started feeling like I was watching something think.

The process itself is almost boring to describe. I typed a prompt into a chat window. Within seconds, sentences started appearing, one after another, structured into an introduction, a few supporting points, and a conclusion that actually landed. No typos. No throat-clearing. Just a finished draft, sitting there, waiting for me to hit publish.

That’s the part that got me. I’ve used autocomplete before. I’ve used spellcheck. This felt different, less like a tool finishing my sentence and more like reading something a person wrote, except no person wrote it. There was rhythm to it. There was a point of view. It even made a small joke that landed. I sat back in my chair for a second, genuinely rattled, and thought: I did not write this, and yet here it is, sounding like me.

It turns out I’m not the only one wrestling with this. Writers and researchers have spent the last few years picking apart what it means for text to come from a large language model instead of a person, and what authorship even means when the writer has no memory, no stake in the outcome, and no lived experience of the world it describes. Reading up on generative AI afterward helped me put words to the unease I felt watching my screen fill up with sentences I hadn’t typed.

So here’s the honest version of events: an AI wrote a full draft of this post in under a minute. I read it, laughed a little, felt oddly unsettled, and then did what any editor would do. I rewrote the parts that sounded too smooth, added my own reactions, and made sure it actually sounded like me and not like a press release. The bones of it, though, the structure and the initial spark, came from a machine that doesn’t sleep, doesn’t get anxious about deadlines, and apparently doesn’t need coffee to find its voice.

I don’t know exactly what to do with that feeling yet. Impressed? A little spooked? Probably both. What I do know is that this post exists because I asked a machine to write it, and it did, and now you’re reading it, which might be the strangest part of all.

I am writing this after contemplating Fanon’s “Black Skin, White Masks” and undertaking a full sequence of reading on the way to reading Homi K. Bhabha’s “The Location of Culture” upon Shahril Hamdan’s recommendation – incidentally, after failing to understand it and after complaining to Shahril, I realized that perhaps it was not the book that was fundamentally flawed, however many articles I found describing how it is badly written.

Rather, it was myself – But I suppose I will go through that thought process another day.

What’s more important is that each day, I’m reminded of the value of time nowadays. I wonder if this is a neurosis. Perhaps it has something to do with the affective way that I’ve been influenced by life all this while. Maybe it is path dependent and the result of my previous decisions.

Either way, I look now at the seconds, at the measurements, at how they are organized, and at how everything contributes in sum to the totality of what I am. In the realization that all of it is finite, finite, oh so finite, what can a man do in a lifetime? That is unclear. How much in an hour can be quantified? Will he, in fact, overestimate what he can do in a year but underestimate what he can do in five? That is really up to him at the end of the day and the truism really does nothing but provide small and cheap comfort.

It seems a little strange that all of this should have given rise to the appreciation of time that I currently have, but it’s just dawned upon me that there are so many books to read and there’s so little time. Yet there are so many of them that need to be understood, apprehended, and integrated into my consciousness before I will be ready to really do what I need to do. That is why I feel every second, every minute, every moment in a deeper sense of feeling. In the realization that every breath that I take, every moment I’m awake, and these contemplations that I pen with my voice in the middle of my oldest home are all passing into an eternity where it will all be gone one day