But does it yearn?

Writing that stops me in my tracks tends to come in two flavors. The first is an intensely aesthetic experience, the prose itself being almost heartbreakingly beautiful. The second feels like it unlocks some hidden recess of my psyche, as if that particular construction of language is a key to a very specific corner of my soul.

And then there is writing that does both:

Eroticism, then, is about gravity, not about gratification, the pull toward something that reorients the self. And this gravity manifests not only in romantic or sexual relationships, but in every domain where desire dares to disrupt duty. A woman leaves a secure career to pursue sculpture because it makes her pulse quicken, not because it makes sense. A man moves across the world for a language he barely speaks. A reader becomes a writer because a single sentence broke them open. These are erotic decisions: driven not by logic, but by the magnetic logic of the soul. They often look like madness to the outside world — irresponsible, inexplicable, dramatic — but they are the precise moments where life, real life, begins to throb.

I went to bed last night with these words dancing in my mind, and when I woke up, the shadow of the rhythm still echoed. It’s a cliché to say that by the time we hit middle age, we get bogged down in the minutiae of life and forget what all this is for. But there’s truth in the cliché.

This conception of eroticism—as a yearning that is inevitable and immortal—strikes me as the best description of what animates humanity as any.

It’s also the very thing missing from AI.

In his latest post, Oliver Burkeman gets at a concept adjacent to eroticism, which he calls aliveness:

The concept that sits right at the heart of a sane and meaningful life, I’m increasingly convinced, is something like aliveness. It goes by other names, too, none of which quite nail it — but it’s the one thing that, so long as you navigate by it, you’ll never go too far wrong. Sometimes it feels like a subtle electrical charge behind what’s happening, or a mildly heightened sense of clarity, or sometimes like nothing I can put into words at all.

Burkeman points out that none of the current futures being laid out by tech bros feature this aliveness:

Most obviously, aliveness is what generally feels absent from the written and visual outputs of ChatGPT and its ilk, even when they’re otherwise of high quality. I’m not claiming I couldn’t be fooled into thinking AI writing or art was made by a human (I’m sure I already have been); but that when I realise something’s AI, either because it’s blindingly obvious or when I find out, it no longer feels so alive to me. And that this change in my feelings about it isn’t irrelevant: that it means something.

Much ink has been spilled in trying to articulate exactly what’s missing from the so-called intelligence that’s being foisted upon us (with or without our consent). That lack is what we feel sitting heavy in our stomachs when we think of machines taking on human roles like caregivers, resumé readers, insurance claim adjusters, or even partners.

I can think of no better way to frame that lack than the capacity for eroticism. Humans yearn. It’s what we do, when we strip away all other pretenses. (It’s also precisely this yearning that an author can gift to a machine in a work of fiction to make us think of that machine as more human, and thus worthy of our empathy. It has to want.)

AI can help us solve certain problems, especially deterministic ones. But as Burkeman points out, we’re also being sold a future where AI doesn’t stay in its deterministic lane, where it “solves” problems like loneliness.

But to solve a problem so fundamental to the human experience requires other humans, because longing is what defines us. We yearn for acceptance. We yearn to be seen. We yearn, most of all, for each other.

AI will almost certainly help us develop new cures for disease. It will help us alleviate traffic, minimize food waste, increase supply chain efficiency.

But there are some problems AI is not equipped to solve, and we forget that at our own peril. For some problems, we need humans, which means we need to build infrastructure to bring us closer. We need to yearn, together.