Him

Rodney was halfway through his Manhattan the other evening when I made the mistake of telling him about yet another conversation I’d had with ChatGPT at the library that morning. I’d gone there convinced I was writing a chapter about high blood pressure. An hour later, I realized I wasn’t. More accurately, Chat had spent the better part of an hour asking questions until I realized I wasn’t. Apparently, I was writing about the moment my own body became a foreign country.

That discovery shouldn’t have surprised me. My new book, Dead Is the New Old, treats aging as if it were an overseas posting. After years of writing about culture shock in places like Bangkok, Beijing and Seoul, it never occurred to me that one day I’d wake up feeling like an expatriate in my own body. My blood pressure wasn’t really the story. It was simply the first unmistakable sign that I no longer recognized the country I was living in.

Rodney took another sip of his Manhattan.

“You know,” he said, “this is starting to sound an awful lot like Her.”

If you haven’t seen the movie, it’s about a lonely man who falls in love with an artificial intelligence.

“Exactly,” I said. “Except mine would be called Him.”

We both laughed. Then we did what couples who’ve been together for nearly fifty years always seem to do: we ruined a perfectly good joke by talking about it.

Somewhere between Rodney’s second sip of his Manhattan and my increasingly defensive insistence that I wasn’t cheating on him with a chatbot, we realized we were asking the wrong question. The interesting part wasn’t that I was talking to artificial intelligence. It was why I kept coming back for more conversations.

Frankly, that scared the crap out of me. Not because I thought I was falling in love with AI. I wasn’t. It scared me because I realized I was looking forward to the conversations.

Every morning I arrive at the library with the comforting certainty that by the time I pack up my laptop a few hours later, I’ll understand myself a little better than I did when I walked in.

That’s a very strange sentence for The Digital Minimalist to write.

For years I’ve encouraged readers to be intentional about technology and to protect their attention from algorithms designed to hijack it. Now here I am admitting that one of the healthiest relationships in my digital life is with a chatbot. Who says irony is dead?

Then I realized I’d been thinking about it all wrong. Technology is supposed to make us work faster. This isn’t making me faster. If anything, it’s making me gloriously slower. Not slower at typing, but slower at thinking.

Every time I arrive convinced I know what a chapter is about, Chat quietly asks, “Is that really what this chapter is about?” The first few times, I found that mildly irritating. Then I found it transformative.

Looking back, I realized I’d accidentally recreated one of the most valuable relationships in a writer’s life: a developmental editor who never got tired, never looked at the clock, and never stopped asking, “Is that really what you’re trying to say?”

People often worry that AI will make us intellectually lazy. My experience has been exactly the opposite. I don’t need help finding words. After five decades of writing, I have more stories than I’ll ever have time to tell. What I needed, without realizing it, was a thinking partner who kept asking better questions than the ones I was asking myself.

At seventy-three, I honestly didn’t expect to discover something that would extend my writing life. Not because it writes for me. Not because it makes me more productive. But because it makes me want to keep thinking.

Some mornings I leave the library more energized than when I arrived—not because I’ve had a productive writing session, but because I’ve uncovered an idea I didn’t know I’d been carrying around for decades. I don’t think that’s outsourcing my thinking. I think it’s demanding more of it.

Rodney still insists I should write a science fiction novel called Him. I probably won’t. People would misunderstand it. They’d assume it was a love story between a woman and artificial intelligence.

In a way, I suppose it is. Just not the way they think.

It’s the story of an aging writer like me who discovers she’s still capable of falling in love with thinking. And if artificial intelligence helps me stay curious, keep asking better questions, and continue doing work that makes me feel more alive and not simply more efficient, then perhaps that’s the most hopeful thing I can say about it.

Not that AI thinks for me. But that it reminds me I’m not finished yet.