I went to see the AI doc at Alamo Drafthouse tonight and - I had some thoughts.

The overwhelming conclusion of the movie is that the coming changes with AI are inevitable. I strongly believe we have both individual and collective choice and power. I do think some things are going to change (software engineering has changed), but I think we can do more than just vote and call our congresspeople as the ending suggests. Vote with your data. Vote with your voice. Vote by choosing to love and value human creativity, thought, care, empathy, and quality time. Spend time with people. Practice patience and tolerance. Go touch grass. Lift others up. Love something, or someone, because of that beautiful imperfection. Allow yourself to make mistakes, to apologize, and to heal and be healed. Contribute to your community. Learn and contribute to the design and content of automated systems - this stuff can be accessible. Your experience matters.

My other issue is that the movie centers so many of the same voices in AI. There’s a line in the movie positing that 20,000 people globally work on AGI-related research and “maybe 200” work on AI safety. I love me some inspiration from experts and, to be clear, I have heaps of respect for both the people featured and the filmmaker. They are all luminaries. But if this is going to actually impact all of us, how can we center 0.00002% of the population working on AI, and then exactly five other people meant to represent the rest of humanity?

Where are the people who will supposedly lose their jobs? Why are we not listening to our friends, our neighbors, anyone who works in our community, our teachers, or our public servants about how this stuff could help them, about how they’re feeling about it? Why are we spending two hours debating whether it’s already doom or utopia instead of collectively listening and imagining the world we want to create together?

I appreciate Daniel Roher’s performance as representative for the AI-anxious in the film, his artistry and his bold vulnerability in tackling this project, which is a vivid and personal journey through real emotions. I don’t actually think it was meant to be a communal narrative, but more a portrait of Daniel’s very intimate journey into fatherhood in some, um, interesting times.

There are a lot more stories out there to be told. I invite y’all to come with me to Taylor, Texas, have a tour, a plate of food, a look around, and a listen. I will gladly host.

What made the experience more eery: there were only three other viewers, and, Alamo Drafthouse no longer has people take orders. You order through your phone and minutes later a human clad in all black silently brings you food. This experience sucks. The magic of Alamo fifteen years ago came from the people - the ones who dressed up as Buddy the Elf in December, who could teach me Avengers lore during the pre-preview entertainment, who warned me with a whisper that it was last call before the big fight scene. Watching a movie alone in the dark as my food appears is trash. I felt like I was in the Matrix pods.

When I was a kid, Major League Baseball made the mistake of muting the noise of the crowd during broadcasts. Viewership plummeted. The crowd noises returned, and so did the fans. I look forward - immensely - to the return of my local Alamo crew, the soul of the place, and my fellow moviegoers.

I think our current AI trajectory is incredible. It will assist us in solving many problems. But it’s still up to us - we have the power to choose how it is applied. I had to go to the DMV today, too, and that’s a whole other can of worms, but there are plenty of places automation can plug in to make everyone’s lives easier there without putting people out of work. I see huge opportunities in personalized medicine, data interaction, creative assistance, skill acquisition, and language and cultural preservation, and this is where I apply my professional efforts. There are many more I can’t see myself and that others continue to enlighten me to.

If you’re looking for hope, it’s out there. Check out the work of Abundant Intelligences, or DAIR, or Native BioData Consortium. Go watch Cliff Kapono and Keolu Fox’s TED talk about storing data in plant DNA (and help us make that a reality). Ask us about our Data Terrarium concept piece. Go check out the incredible open-source projects in the LLM and agentic space, and see that they’re developed by both the world’s biggest, most futuristic corporations and individual developers who created the very thing they wanted and couldn’t find. If you need help imagining alternative data futures, go read the scholarship on Indigenous Data Sovereignty. Check out science fiction and science fact from other places. Don’t be afraid to be curious and ask for help - I think you’ll find most people love to help others.

We have a collective future in this era. We have individual roles in building it. I will continue making building blocks as best I can. I need y’all’s help in making them part of something bigger. I believe we can create something beautiful.

(*No AI was used in the writing of this rant - just good old-fashioned human emotion.)