To the humanities students who booed their commencement speaker’s remarks on artificial intelligence: have you considered that being replaced by a machine is just healthy boundary-setting?
You are sitting in your folding chair under the sweltering Florida sun, sweating through your rented polyester gown. A tech executive on stage is kindly explaining that generative artificial intelligence will soon streamline your entire four-year humanities degree into a three-second prompt. And what do you do? You boo. You let your cortisol spike. You cling to the deeply toxic, late-capitalist notion that your personal thoughts and creative expressions still need to be generated by you.
It is completely valid to mourn the loss of your intended career path. We must make space for those feelings. But anger is a low-vibration response to a beautiful transition. We are currently seeing a massive cultural pivot toward what I am calling Quiet Obsolescence. It is the gentle, intentional practice of stepping back and letting a vast, unknowable server farm somewhere in Nevada do the heavy lifting of your human experience. Instead of fighting the algorithm, we are learning to let it swaddle us.
Chloe, a former illustrator in Austin, tells me she recently outsourced her entire creative practice to a curated language model, and she has never felt more aligned.
I used to spend hours agonizing over color palettes and negative space, which was honestly so draining for my nervous system. Now I just type a few words into a box, and I have so much more time to focus on my morning hydration routine.
When the commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida told you that AI is the future, he was not threatening you. He was offering you the ultimate gift of boundaries. He was giving you permission to put down the pen, step away from the canvas, and let predictive text carry the emotional weight of your existence. We spend thousands of dollars on silent meditation retreats and heavy linen weighted blankets, desperately trying to quiet the noise in our heads. Yet when a tech executive stands at a podium and offers to literally silence the human mind forever, we throw a tantrum.
Take a deep breath. Release the tension in your jaw. Allow the machines to softly overwrite your utility. The next time an algorithm offers to do your life’s work for you, do not boo. Just whisper thank you, and go moisturize.