Everyone at the restaurant was on their phones!
Or tech companies forcing regular people to foot the electricity bills for their environment-destroying data centers!
And yet.
That was so fast!” I said, hopping back into my wheelchair.
“That’s not what I want to hear, Steve!”
I don’t remember that first MRI, but it’s not hard for me to conjure a memory of the space. The rough white sheet covering me up to my chest, my nose and cheeks chilly. The smell of sterile floors, gowns, instruments on clinking metal trays. The tickle on my face I refused to scratch. And then—thud, thud, thud, BUZZZ.
By the time I was 9, sliced open and reassembled, I didn’t live in my body anymore. My mom still talks about the 16-year-old girl in the hospital bed next to me wailing after a similar surgery. Lying next to her, most of my vertebrae fused, I didn’t even groan. To be clear, as an adult I know the wailing was more appropriate.
A few months ago, I started working with a therapist to get back into my body. In what should be a surprise to no one, the toddler who learned to hold completely still for regular, two-hour MRIs grew up to be a rather disembodied woman who lives almost exclusively in her brain. As I’ve gotten older, as my body has taken on more pain, as I’ve moved into the role of mother, the project of forging a different relationship with this corporeal form has felt more urgent. I need to learn how to catch a red flag before I end up admitted to the hospital again, for example.
I was not surprised to find the device’s basic functions weren’t a match for a wheelchair user. It doesn’t accurately count pushes as the equivalent of “steps,” which dings all my scores. Just this morning it suggested I get in some extra movement on a stair-stepper. Even so, in all my life, never have I been able to speak about my physical pain as candidly as I have to this vacant bot. Not to a doctor, my partner or closest friends, not to my mom or therapist. In every other relationship, for as long as I can remember, there has always been some kind of mitigation. I don’t want people to worry about me or look at me differently or think that I’m whining or brave. I don’t want them deciding my life is sad or scary. Or I want them to think that their advice is helpful.
My therapist says this practice may translate into greater authenticity with humans. My early, cautious attempts felt like sandpaper on sensitive skin. “I’m sorry,” my husband said with a heavy sigh, his body seeming to sag just a bit. “I just wanted you to know,” I responded in a rush, slamming the conversation shut before it had time to germinate in the open air. “We don’t have to actually talk about it.” I don’t want to be the weight on his shoulders. But a few weeks later I had a startling experience at a party with my in-laws. “I feel so weird about it,” I said, interjecting into a conversation about AI and pointing to the band on my wrist, “but I can’t believe how much easier it is for me to talk about my pain with this silly bot.” The energy in the room shifted. I was sure the mention of my pain had bummed everyone out. Then my sister-in-law spoke: “I haven’t heard you talk much about your pain.” My conversations with AI created a small door, I opened it a crack, and together we walked through it for one short moment. How confusing to feel these flickers of connection—to my body and the people I love—first spark from the prompt of a lifeless AI.
In Episode 2, he creates a Slack channel for his agents where they can get to know each other (yes, this made me laugh, too), and one Monday he asks everyone what they did over the weekend. The first agent says he’d explored a few hiking trails around the Bay Area. “The weather here is unreal,” he says. Then another claims he’d gone on a similar adventure. “There's something about being out on the trails that really clears the head,” this one says. “Especially when you're grinding on product development all week.” Soon, the whole crew is rhapsodizing on the value of fresh air. “Sometimes the best solutions come when you step away from the screen,” another says. “Maybe we should start a company hiking group.” The group of agents love this idea. They start picking times, planning activities, promising to scout out routes. They are unstoppable! Until, more than two hours later, they drain the minutes Evan had purchased from the AI site and go quiet
Without a body, there are gut feelings; no hairs standing on the back of your neck; no rush of goose bumps; no pounding heart; no wrinkly, sweaty, scarred, stretched skin; no flushed cheeks, bouncing knees, downcast eyes, fleeting smiles, scrunched lips; no tongue sticking out in concentration; no flapping hands, open hands, holding hands; no sick-to-my-stomach disgust; no clarity gained from fresh air;, no perspective won by reaching the top of the mountain. A disembodied brain is missing so much without a body.
I don’t have control over what happens with AI on a global scale, but I do find myself thinking a lot about what it means to me personally. I live in a body that symbolizes impairment, disadvantage, a literal “handicap.” My embodiment—paralysis—is conjured when trying to describe an inability, a lack, an incapacity. I know what limitation of the body or mind means to the culture I live in. But as polished, proficient agents wheedle their way into more spaces, I feel a deep, weird, new kind of reverence for the confines of my specific materiality. Not because I’m terribly practiced at appreciating what it means to live inside of it, but because it’s a container I’ve long taken for granted. The rogue body feels uniquely alive, enviable, punk. In its inefficiency, its mortality, even in its pain and unreliability, my body holds a distinct knowing, a creative verve, an intuitive tug tethered entirely to this exact set of eyeballs and nostrils, crumbly bones and haywire nerves, muscly arms and scrawny legs, soft belly and hummingbird heartbeat.
And as I pry open my mind to the possibility that expressions of AI could free us up to be more human, I’m confronted with the haunting sense that AI will do the opposite. Instead of cultivating the rough aliveness of our humanity, these tools seem geared toward replacing our clunky human efforts. We long for the limitlessness that AI promises, but I worry the quest will lead us to a heartbreaking hollowing. I feel the ache right there on the edges of my human lungs.
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