48 HOURS WITHOUT AI

GOING 2 DAYS WITHOUT THE 'NEXT GREATEST THING EVER' CAN BE DONE, FOR NOW

- STORY: A.J. JACOBS / NYT

Writer A.J. Jacobs uses a real map in New York, on Sept 30.

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-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 all interactions with AI and machine learning 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. Most people are aware that it peppers our social media feeds with targeted ads and powers the chatbots on airline reservation sites. 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 Al Guy”.

“Good luck with that!” said Jeff Wilser, the host of the podcast Al-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 insisted in interviews with me? Or is it the biggest discovery since fire (actually bigger than fire, since it will replace humans), as others claimed?

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.