John West writes code and wins Pulitzers. Sometimes at the same time.
The writer-technologist isn't here to tell you AI will save us or destroy us - he's more interested in the messier question of what we lose when we automate away the parts of life that are genuinely hard. His new book, The Internet Will Die, and So Will You, sets the tone perfectly.
Pour out a brew and get cosy for this one.
Mindstream: When you think about AI’s current trajectory, what excites and concerns you the most?
John West: A friend of mine was struggling, recently, with the news. He was feeling burnt out by it, and also unable to resist reading more of it than he wanted. But he still wanted to read things his friends were reading that were a little off-beat.
Over about a week, I used coding agents to make Mixtab, a little service and browser extension that lets me and his other friends curate a little magazine for him that gets turned into a PDF he can put on his ereader.
Mixtab isn’t scalable software, but it’s fun, useful, and carries some of the DIY spirit of the old Web. I loved that.
But my worry with AI is that we’re going to sand away all the frictionful parts of life that actually make life worth living. Being bad at doing hard things is one of the best things we can do as people, I believe.
It’s not only the only way to get better at a chosen activity, but, when chosen well, it’s also a reliable way to live with meaning.
As AI has developed, how has your personal philosophy towards AI changed?
First of all, I think AI is a bit of a misnomer: Like it’s a stack of machine learning models in a trench coat. They’re all developing in different ways and at different speeds.
In other words, it’s “spiky,” as they say. I think this means its effects on society will be similarly spikily distributed.
But the number one change: I’ve grown even more uncomfortable with confident predictions about the future.
You've been both a journalist covering tech and an engineer building it. Which one made you more cynical?
What a question! I like to believe I’ve kept my heart reasonably naive.
In all seriousness: I think the combination of the two together has done more to make me both more and less cynical than the average bear.
On the one hand, I’ve built tech, so I know how joyful it can be both to make and to use. On the other hand, I’ve built tech, so I know how easy it is to optimize away that very same joy.
Similarly, as a reporter, I’ve seen the incredible power of tech put to uses both good and bad. Speaking of “spiky”—at different times and in different ways, I feel more cynical or more utopian.
Which human skill do you think is becoming more valuable in the AI era?
Moral attention. That is, caring about and attending to things that matter--and not for a utilitarian purpose, but rather for one that promises to enliven and enrich yourself and the world around you.
The internet promised to democratise everything. Looking at it now, what did it actually democratise?
I wrote in my book that “we’ve replaced one set of gatekeepers with another: once, mostly white men on the coasts; now, algorithms controlled by mostly white men on the coasts.” But I don’t want to be too glib.
I think different instantiations of the web have done marvels for making access to knowledge more egalitarian. Consider Wikipedia or the Internet Archive, for example.
Do you think we’re in an AI bubble?
I think the number one thing I’ve learned from the AI boom is to steer clear of predictions. Bubble or no bubble, I think the genie’s out of the bottle on large-language models, but I can’t bring myself to go further than that.
What’s one small decision you’ve made that had a large impact on your life?
In elementary school, I was given a choice for after school classes: organized sports or playing the recorder. I took the recorder path.
I didn’t know then that it would leave me with a conservatory degree, a love of music — and an appreciation for beauty and form — that has served me in every facet of my life, especially tech.
Everyone who creates instrumentalized processes should have to soak themselves in hard-to-instrumentalize activities, too: this is one of my hottest takes.
How do you choose what to automate, and what to leave alone?
It’s vibes all the way down—at least when it comes to my personal life. I try to ask myself: Will replacing this task draw me closer to or further away from my family, my friends, random people?
If I automate my calendar more, would the efficiency be worth losing my admin check in with my partner? (No, I think.) There’s virtue in remaining in the worldly, domestic sphere--and I try to let that moralism guide me.
Which recent AI breakthrough stopped you in your tracks?
Its ability to reason through coding. I still love writing code, but I could see, maybe around Opus 4.8, that I wouldn’t be doing it except as a kind of artisanal exercise much anymore.
Tragic. Amazing. All the feelings.
Finish this sentence: In five years, AI will make people feel ___. Why?
Uncanny. We’ve made a machine to dislocate us from the familiar. A person with no body. A mind with no soul.
John West is a writer and technologist who writes software to report the news. A generalist in subject matter, he specializes in editorial applications of machine learning and natural language processing. His work has won a Loeb and two Pulitzers. The Internet Will Die, and So Will You is his second book.