The Vibes are Off

Lake Merritt is my favorite place in Oakland. It's a relatively small body of water populated with birds ranging from the common duck to the night heron. But on the weekend, the strips of grass surrounding the lake transform. Grills are set up preparing varieties of meats and vegetables. Music plays from speakers. Birthdays, weddings, and a sunny Saturday are all celebrated by the lake.

Juneteenth was a perfect occasion to go to Lake Merritt. But that particular visit was different. That day didn't feel as joyful as normal. I wanted to leave. I didn't have words to explain why the vibe was off. It just was. A few hours after I left, there was a shooting that left 14 people injured.

Tragically, my intuition was right.

I couldn't have predicted there would be violence. But I sensed that the crowd was different. There was no discernible reason. There was simply a gut feeling, the unexplainable urge to leave. Often this kind of intuition is minimized in favor of quantifiable data.

But that day by the lake, my gut feeling was valuable. I had been to Lake Merritt many times. I had previously lived in an adjacent neighborhood and walked along the lake every day. My countless experiences in crowds at concerts, graduations, and public transit gave me insight into what might become dangerous.

In other words, my body has a kind of intelligence honed over my lifetime. The urge to leave the lake that day was not a fluke but a fine-tuned response developed over decades.

So why then do we dismiss "gut feelings" as a foolish impulse?

Because we live in a culture that worships rationality. In order for something to be valid, there needs to be language or data. Often intuition is a feeling without a discernible reason. There is a slight shift in the stomach or a quiet voice telling us to leave.

Without data or an articulate explanation, it's easy to trivialize intuition as foolishness. But it's part of our human intelligence. It's how a great teacher knows whether a struggling student is bored and in need of a challenge or confused and in need of more scaffolding. This part of our humanity is often ignored in conversations about generative AI.

LLMs flatten humanity into language.

AI companies promise to replace whole swaths of workers with chatbots. This vision reduces human judgment to a bot with the right sequence of words. But as anyone who has ever called an airline during a major snowstorm knows, a helpful customer service rep can make a world of difference.

They know when to offer an upgrade, when to reroute you through a nearby airport, and when a moment of empathy matters more than efficiency. This part of work is simply ignored in visions of the future that center generative AI.

Work is not just providing the right words in the right order. It's using empathy and intuition to provide the specific reassurance someone might need. This highly intuitive and emotional labor is being undervalued in visions of the future built around LLMs. Our human intelligence is being condensed to match the capabilities of large language models.

Our humanness comes from our relationship with one another and our ability to sense and be in the world both with and without language. As generative AI is becoming more ubiquitous, I claim the parts of my humanness that don't yet have language.

The intelligence that shows up in the clenched stomach, the racing heart, the stopped breath is valid and important. I can make decisions based on my intuition. I don't need a lengthy explanation or a dataset to justify it. Sometimes it's enough to notice that the vibes are off.

Acknowledgment

Two books that helped me crystallize this post:

• AI Con by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna - This book helped me understand the ways that the current AI hype cycle is devaluing human intelligence as part of the project.
• Smart Management by Jochen Reb, Shenghua Luan, Gerd Gigerenzer - This book helped me understand the value of intuition and simple heuristics in the volatile, uncertain, chaotic, and ambiguous world that we live in.