Could He Avoid AI for Two Whole Days?

Spoiler alert: It was harder than you might think!

- A. J. Jacobs FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES

WHEN I DECIDED to live without artificial intelligence for 48 hours, I figured it would affect some parts of my routine.

I knew I wouldn't be able to watch Netflix algorithm-recommended documentaries or read marketing emails written by bots, for instance. That I could deal with. What I didn’t expect was that my attempt to avoid AI would affect nearly every part of my life—what I ate, what I wore, how I got around.

I undertook this experiment with the goal of seeing firsthand just how prevalent AI is in our everyday lives. I wanted to identify all the AI hiding in plain sight, and to find out what life would be like without it. I would spend two days as the No-AI Guy.

“Good luck with that!” said Jeff Wilser, the host of a podcast called AI-Curious. “I used to say that if you want to avoid AI, you should go be a goat herder in the mountains. Now I can’t even say that, because goat herders probably use it too, wittingly or not. For starters, they check the weather, and nowadays almost every weather prediction is made with AI.”

While researching my subject, I encountered wildly conflicting opinions. Is AI overhyped, merely a glorified spellcheck, as some people insist? Or is it the biggest discovery since fire, as others claim? Is it taking away our freedom of choice by forcing us to obey biased algorithms? Or is it making our lives better in a thousand small ways, as Garrett Winther, the chief product officer of the venture capital firm Newlab, argued.

“People think AI is scary,” Winther told me, “but, really, it’s improving our lives in ways we don’t even notice, allowing us to breathe easier. Literally.” He cited a recent New York State AI programme that used the technology to monitor the air for abnormalities such as methane leaks.

BEFORE I STARTED my experiment on a random Monday in October, I had to answer a fundamental question: How should I define AI?