How to Fill the Space When Children Grow Up and Artificial Intelligence Takes Over
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Photo by Marina Shatskih on Unsplash
I drove up to our local park one morning recently when my kids were all at school. This park with the playground tucked away in the back corner by the lake is where I spent countless hours with my children in what is slowly but surely starting to feel like a different lifetime.
When I pulled into an angled parking space facing the grassy area beside the playground, I saw a small boy, probably around three years old, hustling along behind a mom who was walking briskly a few paces ahead of him, a slightly vacant expression on her face. The boy was carrying a well-worn teddy bear. The bear dangled down from his hand, bouncing against the boy’s little body with each of his steps.
It was a simple scene. A very familiar one. One that instantly whisked me several years back in time. This is the same park where I brought a cardboard box monstrosity to play dolls with my daughter. The same park where we used to come after school to play with friends. The same park where I pushed one or more of my children on the zipline and swings for hours and hours on end, filling the vast expanses of space and time that exist when you’re the parent of small children.
But now, this park isn’t really any of that anymore. At least not for me. I’ve passed it down to other moms and dads who have toddlers and preschoolers clinging to their persons every minute of the day. I still bring my kids to the park occasionally, but our visits are much less frequent. On this day, I was alone as I often am now between the hours of eight and two on weekdays. I brought a box with me, but instead of a makeshift doll castle, this box was filled with books my children now find to be much less interesting than YouTube. I deposited the books in the Little Free Library at the park and went about my day.
Of course, what going about my day means now is a bit of an open question at the moment. The kids are in school and my writing work has been slow. When the kids are home, they typically entertain themselves or play with friends and only require my services for snack and dinner preparation and homework support. I’ve slid seamlessly into a faceless mid-level management role in the household. A role that requires me to complete a daily litany of routine tasks but involves much less interpersonal interaction and snuggling than it did in years past.
With the way things are going, it’s easy to feel like I am being slowly but inexorably replaced on both the work and domestic fronts. The steady ascent of technology and artificial intelligence is almost certain to make many jobs, and possibly my job of writing advertisements, obsolete sooner rather than later. The chatbot you’ve probably heard about by now can already write simple ads as well as, if not better than, I can. In fact, it can do a lot more than write simple things. For example, I asked it to write a rap in the voice of Andrew B. Knott and it totally nailed it. When all my work is usurped by the bot, I am planning to rebrand myself to Lil Knotty (shout out to my friend Matt for this fire stage name) and perform nothing but chatbot-written raps at an open mic near you. I’m sure it will be lucrative until the chatbot learns how to take corporeal form and rap itself (it probably already has…I’m not going to check).
At home, it’s some comfort that I’m not being replaced by anyone or anything, but rather, I’m being crowded out by the passage of time. Kids grow up, parents grow old, and we all have to find ways to fill the spaces that are left behind. The crevices in our minds where the little bodies clutching well-worn teddy bears still live. As much as you try to fill them with iced coffee, boygenius music, and daydreaming about writing a novel that will emotionally wreck readers like Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow wrecked you, those stubborn spaces are hard to fill with anything other than nostalgia.
Perhaps I should consult the AI chatbot for guidance? Nah, it surely won’t have anything useful to say…
Stupid insightful bot (screenshot from chat.openai.com)