How to Stay Happy in an AI-Manufactured World

If you see, read, or hear about something that you think might be performative or fake, then you ought to assume it is.

This past week has been filled with wild news about artificial intelligence: its rapid advance, lingering pitfalls, and serious risks. What struck me most about all the AI takes was a common theme that users had to repeatedly remind themselves that the AI chat bots are not sentient. Which got me thinking — as AI continues to evolve and become more complex, perhaps the only thing that will separate us from it is our being sentient, our ability to experience emotions and feelings.

And, as AI proliferates, the quality of those emotions and feelings will increasingly depend on our ability to live in reality.

In The Practice of Groundedness I wrote extensively about the fact that our happiness at any given point in time is a function of our reality minus our expectations. If our expectations are unrealistically lofty, we tend not to feel good.

Tools that falsify reality for the sake of attracting our collective attention will continue to improve. This means it will be more important than ever, and more challenging than ever, to live in actual reality. Whatever photoshop could do AI will do a thousand…