Things AI could never do

Because ‘falling behind in ai’ does NOT MEAN ‘falling behind in life’

“Dreams are necessary to life” — Anais Nin

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On LinkedIn, the other day, I accidentally saw a post which told me that if I wasn’t using AI for ‘EVERYTHING’ then I was ‘FALLING BEHIND IN LIFE’. It inspired this piece. I hope you like it.

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A List Of Things AI Could Never Do:

• Taste a blueberry matcha on a sunny day

• Fold your laundry

• Change your sheets

• Give your cat a kiss

• Plant, and tend to, flowers

• Add up two simple numbers correctly

• Design and craft a molten ring, or necklace, or bracelet

• Write anything a fraction as good as Billy Joel’s ‘Scenes from an Italian Restaurant’ or Joan Didion’s packing list or ‘This Is Just To Say’ by William Carlos Williams

• Create life

• Ruminate on a google images still-shot of your old home, where your mother happens to be frozen in time, bending to pick a flower, or perhaps pull up a weed

• Experience something like loss when its long-time favourite pop star decides to do something that shows just how out of touch she really is

• Make banana bread

• Make friendship bracelets

• Make love

• Discover a new signature scent

• Get a whiff if a strong perfume that an old crush wore in high school and suddenly feel time whizzing past until you’re sixteen, and pining, once again

• Experience someone telling you you’re a ‘really good singer’ right before kissing you in a McDonalds after 12am

• Break up with someone even though you love them

• Break up with someone and cut your hair into a fringe and realise it actually suits you

• Break up with someone

• Crunch on Lays crisps after a day of sunbathing somewhere in Europe

• Read One Day for the first time

• Listen to a new album on a long train journey

• Design this dress; or these shoes, or this bag

• Bring a kitten home for the first time and watch with anxiety/excitement/boundless love as they explore your apartment which is also theirs (although they don’t know this yet)

• Experience period pain

• Or endometriosis pain

• Or labour pain

• Fix a clock that has stopped working, and belonged to your grandmother, who you miss dearly and whose entire life was accompanied by the ticking of this clock, her very own soundtrack, so that the sound of it makes you feel comforted, and warm, and as though she might be just in the other room, that she might walk in, any second

• Jump into a cold lake, or the unknown

• Fall in love

• Fall out of love

• Create anything that has not already been created before

• Understand the feeling of taking off a bra after a long day, or kicking off your shoes to enter the dance floor at your best friend’s wedding

• Feel the pulsing rhythm of excitement, of joy, of tingling nerves thrumming in your fingertips as you stand, in front of your very best friends and closest family, to declare your love for another person

• Create intricate nail designs which belong in a literal museum

• The feeling of actually booking the girls holiday

• The feeling of journalling your soul, word by word, page by page, thought by thought

• The feeling of hyperfixating on random things (Lena Dunham’s art and how her relationships are represented through them; air dry clay; what ‘taste’ truly means in a world of AI slop)

• Pause, at every single big life decision, to consider how it tracks against your very own fig tree analogy (always, always trying not to let them rot!!!)

• Dream, and dream, and dream – which is, of course, necessary for life.

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N. B.

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