One of my favorite myth-related conceptual labels is that of chess tournament centaurs: a human who plays with computer assistance.

Centaur players tend to outperform both software and human players, though sometimes straight-up AI will have the advantage and some tournament rules favor humans.

I like the premise, though, because I believe it points at a (generally applicable) truth that we’re augmented by technology more frequently than we’re replaced by it. And even in cases when we’re replaced, that replacement is almost always an opportunity, not just a hindrance or hardship.

I’ve been watching the world of digital image-creating machine learning models (like DALL-E 2, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion) with interest, as although these services are already raising (perhaps warranted) concern in many industries, they could make some laborious tasks less-tedious, enable new flavors of creation, and birth entirely novel professions and fields.

They’re also sparking some valuable conversations (what is art? who should own the rights to AI-supported works? at what point are remixes new work, and when are they rip-offs?) that I think we need to have, and which might even underline weaknesses in our existing mental and legal models about what’s valuable, what we should be funding, and who should profit from what.

Moments like this are tinted with just as much tumult as opportunity, and such moments have historically been uncomfortable, weird, and norm-upending.

A little while ago I looked into AI-cloning my own voice to both better understand these technologies and their potential, and to maybe get ahead of a trend that could—theoretically at least—leave me out of a job.

I discovered that the tech was impressive but not a reliable replacement for my own labor and skill.

That was over a year ago, though, and these technologies are evolving rapidly. I expect at some point in the near-future (I’m planning to try that experiment again later this year) I’ll need to start thinking about how I might use these tools to reduce my hands-on (voice-on?) labor so I can reapply that time and effort elsewhere, and maybe even license out my voice (the AI-version of it) to others who might want to use it (which comes with all sorts of other concerns, but might also represent a new revenue stream).

I’ve read some interesting work by folks who’re using similar tools to augment their writing capabilities, allowing them to offload some of their tedious work (coming up with non-repetitive descriptions of locations or characters, for instance, and suggesting interesting plot-twists) so they can reallocate their time and energy to other things. I’m keen to check this out at some point, as well, though at the moment the relevant non-fiction tools seem to be more marketing copy-oriented, and thus not terribly useful to me and my work.

It’s understandable and normal to feel nothing but threatened when new tools that seem likely to mess with our habits and priors arise, especially when those habits and priors are (seemingly) inextricably tied to how we pay our rent and buy groceries.

A heuristic I use for such moments is to imagine how I might have gotten ahead of such concerns and made them work for me (rather than against me) during earlier periods of innovation and tech-induced, professional usurpation.

If I had been a working-aged adult back when the internet was first becoming available for public, commercial use, knowing what I know now about how that eventually iterated and grew, what moves might I make? What might I invest my time, energy, and resources in to take advantage of that transition? How might I convert my fear into interest?

Where would I put my money, what skills would I learn, what relationships would I want to build, and how might I change my perception of the world and how it works so I’m optimally prepared for what’s to come?

Same question, but for the development of semiconductors, or the deployment of electricity, or the introduction of the steam engine or coal power or war ponies?

We’re living through a moment in which there are numerous “holy crap”-level changes happening across a vast swathe of professions, and all of them have the potential to be either flashes in the pan or world-changing introductions to new norms that will shape how things look five or ten or twenty years from now.

It requires a bit of mind-bending effort and exertion to consider using intuitively threatening forces for our own purposes, but often that’s the best way to ride this sort of wave rather than being washed away (or drowned) by it.

Again, this may be nothing, this may be a neat gimmick that tallies a few interesting accomplishments before subsiding to make way for something else.

But getting in the habit of imagining utilities and outcomes in this way can be beneficial, even if the effort is often applied to shiny fads and techno-duds rather than truly paradigm-altering advances.

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