Slow Down, The AI Apocalypse Is Boring

It’s important stuff, the noticing.

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I once spent an entire Sunday afternoon trying to remember the name of that bloke who played a villain in a film I watched in 1988. A secondary antagonist, big German. It was absolutely vital that I remember this, apparently, because my brain had decided it was more important than paying bills or contemplating the general meaninglessness of my existence.

The thing is, I could’ve googled it in approximately 0.4 seconds. Type “1988 film Die Hard, villains gang,” hit enter, job done. But I didn’t. I sat there, staring at the wall, occasionally making small grunting noises whilst my brain churned through decades of accumulated cinematic detritus like some sort of failing search engine running on lukewarm tea and regret. And eventually, around 4pm, it came to me. Alexander Godunov. The satisfaction was brief but genuine, like finally managing to scratch an itch in the middle of your back that’s been bothering you all day.

Which is exactly the opposite of how we’re supposed to use our brains now, isn’t it? Because AI has arrived with all the subtle grace of a drunk uncle at Christmas, promising to make everything faster, more efficient, more... better. Except it doesn’t make things better. It just makes them happen sooner, which is fundamentally not the same thing.

The thing about speed is that you can move fast, or you can notice things, but you can’t do both. And by ‘noticing things,’ I don’t mean ‘pausing to admire a particularly well-formed cumulus cloud.’ I mean ‘realising you’ve left the gas on,’ or ‘spotting the early, faint signs that your entire professional identity is about to be rendered obsolete by a chatbot that doesn’t even need coffee breaks.’ It’s important stuff, the noticing.

I started using ChatGPT to write birthday messages to people. Not close family, obviously. I’m not a complete monster. But mates I hadn’t seen in years, acquaintances from university, that bloke I used to share a flat with who now lives in Australia and occasionally surfaces on Facebook to remind me he exists.

The thing is, it was brilliant. I’d type “write a funny birthday message for someone I knew at university who studied engineering and now works in renewable energy,” and thirty seconds later I’d have a perfectly serviceable message with a little joke about solar panels and a warm-but-not-too-intimate closing sentiment. Job done. I went from dreading these social obligations to dispatching them with the efficiency of a particularly organised serial killer ticking names off a list.

Except one day, someone replied saying “cheers for the message, very ChatGPT.” (If you’re reading this Ken, sorry about that!”) And I felt this sudden, lurching embarrassment, like being caught picking your nose at a funeral. Because they were absolutely right. Every single one of those messages had the same weird, overly-polished tone. The same structure. The same desperate eagerness to please. They read like they’d been written by someone who’d learned about human friendship by watching Hallmark films whilst heavily sedated.

But they were fast. My God, were they fast. Like a sort of digital conveyor belt of synthetic warmth, churning out connection-shaped objects that looked right from a distance but felt hollow the moment anyone actually touched them. And I’d sent dozens of the bloody things, spraying them across people’s Facebook walls like some sort of automated well-wishing bot, completely unaware that I was essentially admitting I couldn’t be bothered to spend three minutes thinking about them as actual humans.

And here’s the mechanism, the actual machinery of how this grinds your brain into paste: AI doesn’t just make individual tasks faster. It makes the entire loop faster. You ask it a question, it answers immediately. You ask it to write something, boom, there it is. No thinking time. No processing time. No time for your slow, wet, biological brain to actually consider whether the question you asked was even worth asking in the first place.

It’s like being stuck on the Northern Line with a manic, over-caffeinated passenger jabbing you in the ribs every ten seconds to shout, “ARE WE THERE YET? FASTER! FASTER!” Except you’re not actually going anywhere. You’re just moving faster towards a destination that turns out to be a crappy, empty skip full of discarded dreams and automatically generated SEO-friendly bollocks.

The supposed wisdom, the advice you’ll get from every tedious productivity guru and their personal brand Instagram account, is this: ‘Your job is to decide what should stay slow.’ Which sounds lovely and profound until you actually try to implement it whilst simultaneously answering seventeen Slack messages, attending three overlapping Zoom meetings, and trying to remember whether you fed the cat this morning or yesterday morning or possibly not at all.

But here’s what I actually learned, after watching myself get quietly overwhelmed by tools that were supposedly designed to ‘help’ us:

You need to actively protect thinking time like it’s the last Chocolate Digestive biscuit in the packet. And I don’t mean in some vague, aspirational way where you nod sagely and then immediately check your phone. I mean you literally schedule it. Block it out. Thirty minutes every morning where you just sit there and think about what you’re actually trying to do that day, before any AI tool, any email, any notification gets to have a say in how you spend your time. Will you feel like an absolute pillock doing this? Yes. Will it be uncomfortable because your brain has been rewired to expect constant stimulation? Also yes. Do it anyway.

Ask yourself, every single time, whether speed is actually the thing you need. Most of the time, it isn’t. Most of the time, what you actually need is something that doesn’t make you want to claw your eyes out with embarrassment when you read it back later. Something that contains an actual thought, rather than a thought-shaped arrangement of words that an algorithm spat out because it noticed those particular phrases appear near each other in approximately 40,000 previously published articles about blockchain or wellness or whatever the current flavour of aspirational tedium happens to be.

Deliberately slow down the things that matter. I’m not talking about artificially creating friction for the sake of it, like some sort of productivity masochist. I’m talking about recognising that the stuff that actually defines you as not-a-robot requires time. Writing something you’re proud of requires time. Understanding a complex problem requires time. Having an original thought, one that hasn’t been regurgitated from some vast statistical model of every thought anyone’s ever had before, requires time. Give it that time. Even if it feels wasteful. Especially if it feels wasteful.

Create a list of questions you ask before letting AI touch something. Mine are: Does this need to sound like me, specifically? Does the quality of this actually matter? Am I using this because it’s genuinely helpful, or because I’m too knackered to think? That last one is crucial, by the way. Sometimes you are too knackered to think, and that’s fine, but you should at least be aware that you’re outsourcing your brain because you’re exhausted, not because it’s the optimal choice. Self-awareness won’t save you, but it might make you feel slightly less complicit in your own intellectual redundancy.

The truth is that if you let AI set the pace for everything, you end up living at algorithm speed, which is to say: you stop living entirely and just become a sort of flesh-based API endpoint, processing inputs and generating outputs without any actual thought occurring in between. Your life becomes a depressing cycle of rapid responses and instant gratification, each one slightly less satisfying than the last, like eating an entire packet of digestive biscuits in one sitting and then wondering why you feel sick and empty.

And yes, you probably won’t follow any of this advice, because humans are fundamentally idiots who’ll choose the easy option every single time, even when we know it’s slowly rotting our brains from the inside out. But at least now, when you’re sprinting through your day at a pace dictated entirely by various algorithms and productivity tools, occasionally you might remember that bloke who spent an entire Sunday afternoon trying to remember Alexander Godunov’s name. And you might wonder whether the speed you’ve gained was worth the loss of every small, pointless, utterly human moment where your brain was allowed to just... churn.

Because that’s all we’ve got, really. Those slow, grinding moments where we actually think about things. And if we give all of those to the machines because they promise to do it faster, we’re not living our lives. We’re just frantic little cogs in a machine that’s built solely to produce more content, more data, more noise. It’s a crime against the retina, designed by a sadist, and it’ll leave you with a permanent case of spiritual exhaustion that no amount of productivity hacks will ever cure.

The AI apocalypse isn’t coming. It’s already here. And it turns out it’s just really, really boring.

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Ask The Hum

Question: My mum has discovered ChatGPT and now sends me AI-generated poems about the weather, meal suggestions I didn’t ask for, and yesterday, a “personalised fitness plan” despite me never mentioning fitness. She’s proud of how “clever” she’s being. How do I explain this is mental without crushing her?

David, Bristol

The Hum responds:

Dear Drowning in AI Poetry,

Your mum has discovered the digital equivalent of a photocopier and believes she’s invented literature. She’s experiencing the brief, intoxicating high that comes from pressing a button and watching a machine produce something that looks like effort without requiring any actual thought. It’s the same dopamine hit people get from a slot machine. She thinks she’s being productive. She’s actually just enthusiastically forwarding spam she commissioned herself.

The fitness plan is the real tell. She’s not listening to you anymore because she’s too busy listening to the machine tell her what you need. It’s her attempt at parenting filtered through a chatbot that doesn’t care if you exist. The poems will continue until her enthusiasm collapses under the weight of ChatGPT’s relentless mediocrity, which should happen in roughly three to six weeks.

The Hum