AI and The Soft Loss of Solitude

A Millennial Reflection on AI, Poetry, Friendship, and the Future of Being Alone

This is a little personal reflection on how our collective worlds are changing with the rapid growth of AI in our work and personal lives. As much as most of my posts are focused on the business of AI, I thought it might be helpful to step back and write something a bit more reflective. AI, after all, is changing how we relate to ourselves even as it changes the world around us. This piece doesn’t have a simple takeaway, and I’ll admit that up front. But if you are curious about how AI is changing your brain, read on!

A Moment to Step Back

The conversations around AI often ring with urgency and awe, as if we’re witnessing the dawn of a brand-new epoch. CEO comments don’t help. Just today Andy Jassy wrote that “Generative AI may be the largest technology transformation since the cloud (which itself, is still in the early stages), and perhaps since the internet.”

We are not tamping down the hype with statements like that. And it’s true that we’re all living through transformative times—swept up in the potential and perils of large language models, deep learning systems, and machine intelligence. We’ll look back on this decade as History with a capital H.

In all the excitement, it’s easy to forget to pause, to step back, and ask the quieter, more intimate questions: How does living with AI—always at our fingertips—shape our everyday experience? What happens to those corners of life that once belonged only to ourselves, in silence?