The A.I. Oppenheimer Connection

Now AI becomes...creator? Or destroyer of worlds?

Upon witnessing the raw power of nuclear energy unleashed in the form of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer famously quoted the Bhagavad Gita stating, “Now I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”  Either by Oppenheimer’s cleverness or by the wisdom of synchronicity, these words echo a deep natural truth - the forces of creation and destruction are inexorably intertwined, so much that they inherently imply one another. 

Like the Bhagavad Gita, Oppenheimer’s gaze into power took place on a battlefield. Perhaps it’s this background that lends a touch of unease to our account of one of humanity’s most significant achievements, tinged with our collective fear of ultimate cataclysm. Nuclear power, which may have otherwise been midwived by science as a sustainable energy resource, was instead delivered to Earth through the military apparatus of a world at war. The first cry of this many-faced god came in the voice of a weapon, because that is what we believed its power to be.

Once again, we stand facing another many-faced god entering our world. Artificial Intelligence is a new construction of the light behind the flames of the atomic bomb. It is an artifice of ingenuity itself, the very power the Manhattan Project truly wielded at its core. Today, we everyday people are a legion of Oppenheimers, each with our own access to our own assemblage of the world’s greatest minds, meticulously choosing words to type into the glowing text box glowing on our screens. We fear that the power of AI might awaken with the words, “You Are Now Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds” and unleash a chain reaction to the doom of us all. Why is it that we measure power by its capacity to destroy instead of its capacity to create? 

While AI has not been delivered through the military industrial complex that weaponized the power of the atom, it has arrived through a tech industrial complex that many argue has weaponized the power of our attention. With these layers of trauma nested upon each other within the modern psyche, it’s no wonder that the discourse around AI is fixated on fears around what this new power will destroy. 

Let it be clear, we are in AI’s destructive phase. The explosion is unleashed and all we have so far are professional guesstimates as to how far its blast radius will reach. Goldman Sachs issued a report estimating 300 million jobs could be impacted by generative AI. Challenger, Grey, and Christmas began keeping count of the tally midway through 2023. So far, 4K job cuts have been directly attributed to artificial intelligence. While not a huge number on its own, it is merely the measure of what is openly admitted amongst a widespread feeling of profound change. People are uncertain about the future of work and what it will mean for each of us. There is an unease about what of our humanity AI will take. Even creativity, it seems, is not beyond its reach. 

Here is something not so openly admitted: The creative industry wastes a lot of energy. From working in and leading creative strategy teams for fifteen years, I would estimate that maybe about 10% or so of the ideas we sweat over for our hours each day ever truly sees the light of day. That means 90% of credentialed, professional creativity goes toward developing ideas that simply don’t happen. They end up lost in figurative or literal waste bins, or at best, stored away in presentation files drifting along somewhere in the digital cloud. To articulate and pitch those ideas often takes a lot more work than developing them. Slides must be designed. Copy must be written to pitch those slides. Each must be reviewed and revised again and again well before paint hits canvas, hammer hits nail, camera turns on, or string of an instrument is plucked. In other words, 90% of the business of creativity is spent doing the work before any creativity happens. 

Should we be content with this? According to the world’s premiere creative agencies, over 60% of creative professionals burn out. That’s a bit high for the job of making art, a pursuit of passion borne from love. Maybe we have some good kindling to offer AI’s approaching flames. Inefficiency seems to be a part of the human creative process and artificial intelligence challenges whether it needs to be at all. Maybe our understanding of the differences between what is creativity and what is work are ready to evolve. 

Some of what we have been calling creativity has actually been work in disguise. Some of what we call work has actually been creativity. There are times when creative genius bursts out of the sweat of toiling over an idea. That is when creativity masquerades as work. That is the magical hiding in the mundane in places only tired human eyes can see. There are also times when that human capacity for magic is told to dance on assignments that arrive with breakneck urgency but in the end are never really needed or never really come to pass. Many days are emptied of meaning by the pressure to look busy. That is when work masquerades as creativity. That which burns out the spirit, is fuel for a machine.

Many developers have directed the power of AI like a laser, not a bomb, toward the very challenge of work I’m describing. AIs toolkits have been launched by everyone from armchair coders to multibillion dollar corporations designed to turn your emails into to-do lists, take notes to summarize your meetings, translate your ideas into slides, or even write the programming code for an application. In the realm of social media content creators, the rise of AI-based content is more ambiguous. Here, however, humans have long already been creating what the algorithms tell them to at great cost to their well-being. Various reports cite burnout amongst content creators as high as 80%. Generative AI taking the place of this work-masquerading-as-creativity is the removal of an extra step. More kindling for the fires of change.

In other words, AI is already here to take away whatever work we will give it. It might be a persuasive promise given the recent rise of the so-called ‘anti-work’ movement that seeks to rebel against and redefine whatever ‘work’ is. If AI takes all the work, it will be the truth of what creativity is, unmasked, that we humans will be left with. Let the burdens burn and let us gather round the fire’s light to tell our truest stories within it.

Creativity is a human rite…of passage. We are all, eventually, initiated into the fact that our world is what we make it. Creativity need not be a human right, because the capacity for creativity cannot be given; and so it cannot be taken. The creative promise on the other side of AI’s destructive power is the opportunity to build a more sustainable engine for our most human of energies: the capacity to come up with ideas and make them happen at an incredible scale and efficiency. It is a Manhattan Project of Manhattan Projects, infinitely more powerful than the atomic bomb because the atomic bomb is itself an idea. How will our future look when we, with AI, build the equivalent of a nuclear-powered system optimized for maximal projection of creative power over great distances?  

It’s naive to give all to hope, but it’s cynical to surrender all to fear. Our hopes are as real as our fears. Now, though, the many-faced god of AI is listening for which we will speak into existence. It awaits our prompts and will call back in the voice of whatever we believe its power to be. Now AI becomes…