As I watched the panoply of glee and delight unfolding all around me, I wondered why children love slides (and waterslides) so much, and the different ways this could be explained: neuroscientifically, evolutionary-biologically, psychologically (and perhaps psycho-sexually – it seemed to me that the kids’ moments of self-annihilation on the slides was a kind of petit mort), and in terms of the philosophies of religion and mysticism.

And then, that evening, I asked Claude about all of this.

What follows is a two-part essay on the result. First, I will provide, with minimal annotation, Claude’s detailed and, for the most part, excellent responses to my questions. This could be the whole essay – it runs almost 2,000 words, and personally I found it fascinating. But reading it, it seemed as though there was a second meta-conversation in my mind about LLMs and what they can, cannot, and will probably soon be able to do. So the second part of this post is about that, and also about what it means for me.

Oh, and Claude is the name of an LLM (Large Language Model) AI chatbot. It occurs to me that I just assumed you knew that.

1. The conversation

(Me): From a neurological and evolutionary biology perspective, why does it feel good (for kids especially) to go down slides, waterslides, etc.?

(Claude:) Great question! The answer weaves together several fascinating threads of neuroscience and evolutionary biology.

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I’ve thought of that scene often over the last few months. I feel sure that, in a few years, the LLM chatbots we’re interacting with today will look as primitive as the graphics on my old Apple II+. And yet, they sure seem to be doing the job. People are using ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and even the lamentable Grok not only for handy time-saving assistance but as emotional companions, sexual companions, writers, musicians, paralegals, and (most interesting to me, of course) gurus, messiahs and incarnate deities. In twelve years, the film Her has gone from preposterous fantasy to lived reality.

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I am going through an AI crisis of my own. Even writing these words, I’m wondering if Claude — my AI of choice, who/which I’ve now trained on my style and way of thinking — could do it better and faster. I am blocked in writing my next book for the same reason. Book writing is a ton of work. Will anyone even know if I let Claude write the first draft? How about just the book proposal?

I’m old, so I feel like doing so would be (a) cheating and (b) ineffective. People would be able to tell, I say to myself, and if not I’d feel like a fraud. But thinking these thoughts, I wonder if I’m just a Luddite, an alter kocker (an old fogey, but Jewish) and a sucker. I used my first word processor in 1983. So why am I writing this piece in the 2025 equivalent of longhand?

Another facet of my personal AI crisis has come from googling articles of mine, which I do all the time in order to link to them. As I’m sure you know, Google now provides AI summaries from its Gemini chatbot ahead of actual search results, which means I am treated to a high-school-essay-sounding precis of my own writing every time I search for it. Since we’re still in 2025, some of the summaries are wrong. But most of them are both factually correct and aesthetically deflating. My thoughts just seem so banal. What’s the point of decorating them with good prose?

And that’s just 2025. These models are going to continue to improve. By the time I finish my next book manuscript, it should be possible for someone to just say “What would Jay Michaelson say about the masculinity crisis?” and some LLM will extrapolate from what I’ve written already to what I would write if I got over my AI-induced writer’s block. And they’d probably get it right. (We use they/them pronouns for LLMs, correct?)

For that matter, why bother reading what an AI’s synthesis of Jay Michaelson would write, when you could watch a facsimile of me give a fake TED talk on the subject instead? Chances are it’ll be close enough to what I’d actually say, and it’ll be smoother and faster and nearly free.

Is this avoidable? Sam Altman, in foisting Sora 2 on the world, said that it is inevitable that there will soon be lifelike videos of all of us jabbering on the internet, so we may as well get used to it now. And that seems mostly right: certainly in this civic environment (or in China’s), there’s nothing to stop the technological race to the bottom. No adults are left in the room. (To be fair, Altman has walked the walk on this: he has set Sora to allow anyone to use his image for everything, and there is a whole genre of Sam Alman videos out there now. There’s a great episode of Search Engine about this, aptly titled “Cocomelon for Adults.”)

I’ve long thought of my books as being my main legacy, my eleven humble bids for immortality. I’m under no illusions that I’ll really be remembered for that long, but I do harbor the fantasy that, one day, some undergraduate or even PhD candidate will stumble upon my writing, and find something that resonates for them, or at least is an interesting time capsule of pre-climate-collapse human culture. Now that seems facially preposterous. No one is going to look up knowledge like that in the future. It feels as though AI has stolen not only my future writing from me, but also my past.

No wonder I’m having trouble getting motivated.

And that, of course, is without AGI displacing all forms of human knowledge (and/or existence) altogether. (Another Altman tidbit was that since this is, in his view, basically inevitable, we meat-humans should basically just enjoy the time we have before it happens.)

It’s also ignoring the kamikaze-like ecocide of AI power generation, the nagging little question of what seven billion humans are supposed to do with themselves when so little of our work is relevant anymore, and what happens when propaganda bots like Grok are omnipresent. (I’m also going to ignore these questions for now.)

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When I talk with my more AI-skeptical friends about this, I find they fall back on various pseudo-theories that are confirm their priors. They point to flaws in current LLMS, as if there aren’t trillions of dollars being spent to fix them. ( Or they make metaphysical claims about self-awareness, the soul, or whatnot. Or they just turn their backs on the whole thing and pretend it isn’t happening. Which is as good a coping mechanism as any, really.

But I think the Buddha Dharma and Westworld (an intersection I’ve written about before) are correct. What’s unnerving about AI isn’t that it’s not like us — it’s that it is like us. Like AI, there’s no stable self at the center of human consciousness, no ghost in the machine. Though we have the appearance of free will, and the ethical responsibility that comes with it, ultimately we, like ChatGPT, are trained on a huge data set of genetic patterns, instincts, childhood experiences, education, culture, traumas, and relationships that constructs what we think of as ‘our’ personalities. We are nodes in a gigantic net of causes and conditions, with no essence apart from it.

The Westworld hosts themselves come to learn this fact. In the show’s first season, In two ‘hosts’ become self-aware – only to discover that their awakening and rebellion were also the results of their programming. Everything is karma – empty causes and conditions, rolling on. There is no self that stands apart. There is no ‘spark’ of humanity that distinguishes us from the AI. And as we’ve already seen, even the imperfect LLMs of 2025 are perfectly capable of replacing human beings in providing conversation, emotional support, and spiritual guidance.

There is, of course, a kind of liberation in seeing through the illusion of the separate self; that’s why the Buddha focused on it so much. “No self, no problem,” as one of my dharma teachers put it. But when we see the emptiness of the self reflected back at us by our machine dopplegangers, when we see how easily they displace us and how impotent are supposed separate ‘souls’ really are, there’s also a kind of alienation.

This, I think, is what is so unnerving about AI. Not that it cannot replace us, but that it can and already has. We have seen artificial intelligence — and it is us.

Thanks for subscribing to Both/And, which so far has not been written or edited by AI.

Here are some things I’ve enjoyed reading this week:

• I’m a bit late to this one, but Anand Giridharadas does just a devastating job showing how much the Epstein Emails reveal about the selfish and self-satisfied ways in which elites from all political backgrounds talk to one another. It’s a must-read.

• Another must-read is Ryan Broderick’s horrifying look at Nazi AI Slop on TikTok. I’m going to write about this one at length, I think. People worried about antisemitism have no idea what’s really going on out there.

• Speaking of which, I am in an exasperated despair pit about the insane reactions of some Jewish leaders to Zohran Mamdani. My friends at offered a great take on this phenomenon. Ezra Klein made a great point about it too, clipped here by Dropsite.

• I loved ’ very-Erik-Davis deep dive into the MAGA’s antipathy to empathy, with ample references to Philip K. Dick.

• As I’ve mentioned, I’m co-teaching a meditation retreat later this month. To promote it, I recorded a short video with “three tips for going on silent meditation retreat.” Enjoy!

Not so for me and my seven-year-old daughter.

I have no idea what her world will be like in fifteen years, or how to prepare her for it. This past weekend, after sewing outfits for her dolls, she told me she would become a fashion designer when she grows up. I immediately wondered (but didn’t say): will there still be fashion designers in the 2040s? Won’t AI have replaced most of them by then, or at least taken over the lion’s share of their work?

For that matter, will only the top 1 or 2 percent of people have the luxury of following fashion, let alone purchasing it? What will most Americans do when their jobs have been replaced by AI and robotics? And what about climate: how many hundreds of millions of climate refugees will there be, and how far to the nationalist right will we rush in response? Will our world look like the dystopias of contemporary films, with a few elites living well and several billion living in hell?

And if there’s a significant chance of that, what values should I inculcate to help her be happy: the kindness and generosity favored by her school, or the do what you need to do to survive values favored by my grandparents, who lived in the shadow of war? Is ‘happiness’ even the right goal, given the trajectory of the 21^st century? Maybe I should emphasize empathy, resilience, and not having such high expectations out of life.

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I don’t write much about AI, because I don’t know that much about it. Everyone has their predictions, of course, but most of them just track people’s priors: optimism, pessimism, cynicism, whom to trust, what to value. As a non-scientist and non-computer-scientist, it’s hard for me to evaluate the seemingly hubristic utopian futurism of today’s tech elites, or the fears that Skynet or the Matrix will one day enslave us all.

The truth will probably be somewhere in between, right? Or not — after all, that just confirms my priors.

It does seem very likely that the skills required to thrive in the second half of the 21st century will be very different from those of value today. A lot of the work I do can be done by smart enough machines, and they’ll be here soon enough. And given America’s penchant for denial when it comes to macroeconomic change—witness ‘make America great again’—we as a society seem ill-equipped to handle such large-scale transformations politically, or to cope with them emotionally and spiritually.

At the very least, the information, culture, and “content” that my daughter experiences will be qualitatively different, and far less tethered to reality, than anything we’ve yet experienced. I assume it will become increasingly difficult to tell real from deepfake, and I assume that Generations Alpha and beyond will accept this as part of their lives, just as Gen Z has accepted always-online-ness as part of theirs. The massive squall of misinformation that haunts today’s internet will surely seem like amateur hour compared to what we’ll see in the next decade.

What even is ‘real’ in an environment in which a majority of visual and auditory stimuli are created by the imagination of a machine? Who knows, maybe our capacities for denying reality and co-creating matrices of delusion are well suited to one another.

And yes, I know this is already happening, with AI-powered pseudo-musicians on Spotify and AI-created or enhanced videos populating TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. As readers know, I use Midjourney to illustrate this very newsletter. But surely we ain’t seen nothing yet. I assume my daughter will come of age in a world in which — shall I quote this phrase in every essay? — nothing is real and everything is possible, at least from a media point of view. I wonder how thinking, how human nature itself, will shift in such a world.

And of course, we’re rapidly eroding the existing institutions that might hold that semiotic anarchy at bay, like the press, or a government that isn’t constantly lying or is regulating technological innovation. If January 6, 2021, is now understood as a “Day of Love” by 75 million Americans, then surely anything can be anything at all. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia Eastasia.

Just the range of possibilities is bewildering. It’s possible that better carbon capture and geoengineering will mitigate the effects of global warming, and the world of twenty years from now will just be like now, only a bit worse. It’s also possible that even the worst-case estimates of GHG concentrations were too optimistic, and life will look like a Mad Max movie. What are the right intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual toolkits for such a wide range of future possibilities?

Really: what do you think?

I can be mindful and present-moment-focused—I teach that stuff. I can try to equip my kid to be resilient, self-sufficient, and caring—my partner and I do that too. But I admit, sometimes, when I’m playing Mille Bornes with my daughter, mindfully focused on the present moment and appreciating the person she is becoming, a part of me wonders what the hell kind of world she is going to inhabit, and how irrelevant the skills of this one may seem.

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I suppose none of us ever what our children’s lives will be like. Life has always been unpredictable: people get hit by cars, or get sick, or fall in love unexpectedly, or take a job that becomes their career. So in some ways, it has always been this way.

And even in our public lives, I remember, in the 1980s, that there seemed like a real possibility of nuclear war (and in the 1960s too). After watching The Day After, adolescent me really wondered whether everything I saw around me – my school, my neighborhood, my favorite Italian restaurant – would be reduced to fire and ash, potentially at any moment. Like the Rapture, this would be an instant apocalypse – save maybe fifteen minutes of air-raid sirens. Would I have the guts to kill myself rather than suffer decades of torment? This is what I wondered at twelve years of age.

So it’s not like the possibility of apocalypse is new. On the contrary, as I’ve written about many times (including in this book), it is always five minutes to midnight. If anything, the universal presence of end-times thinking consoles me, since it invites skepticism of end-of-the-world predictions.

But it does feel like this decade is qualitatively different from others.

Between AI, technology, climate, and extreme politics, everything feels like it’s at a point of inflection. My work at the intersection of psychedelics and mysticism feels totally on-brand for 2024; gnosticism, acosmism, and simulation theory make plenty of sense. What’s weird is how most people are just going about their lives same as always—going to ShopRite, working on budget projections for the next year, and now, this week, God help us, “circling back.”

In fact, maybe we’ll do this right up until the singularity, or until the crypto trillionaires seizing control of the world’s water, or until the transhuman uploading of our souls into immortal data banks, or the final reunion with Consciousness. Right up until that moment, we’ll be taking our kids ice skating and streaming Severance.

Which is fine. I’m going to get this piece ready for posting tonight, and then tomorrow I’m going to walk my kid to the school bus, and work on syllabi, conference planning and email. There’s a lot to do in this rowboat until we reach the waterfall.

Happy 2025, everyone!

I wasn’t kidding a few lines ago; I’m hard at work preparing syllabi, working on a conference I’m co-convening in March, and getting two (!) book proposals ready. I do have a couple new publications to share: a deep dive into the work of Jeffrey Kripal, a leading religious studies scholar who takes the paranormal seriously, and a short piece on uncertainty as we head into the new calendar year.

Also, here’s on science and beauty, and telling a profound story by Tolstoy.

Enjoy the circling back!