About the author

Michael McNamara

The Quiet Cost grew out of a conversation I had in a kitchen with my wife and another couple. It started, like many things in my life tend to, because of a random question I probably shouldn’t have asked. Out of nowhere, I put this couple on the spot and asked them how betrayed they would feel if their partner created an AI version of them and practiced an argument with that AI, in an effort to change its mind. Weird question to ask over brie, I know, but I asked nonetheless. What was stranger to me, however, was how indifferent they seemed to be to the scenario. How low on the ‘betrayal scale’ they deemed it to be. And they weren’t the only ones. Nearly every couple I asked after that seemed to shrug in the same ways and appear unbothered by their partner doing something like that.

Instead, their concerns about AI mirrored a lot of what I saw on social media every day. The fact that we could all lose our jobs, that art would die and become just AI slop, and that humans might become extinct at the hands of AI. You know, the Big 3. But I couldn’t help but imagine what we might stand to lose if we continued to just focus on those extreme concerns. In my everyday life, which centers around the hospitality industry, I was already seeing a change in the habits of those I worked with. I also thought back to my days as a teacher at a Montessori school, and recognized some of the trends in learning that come with removing friction.

My career has been all over the map, from working at bars to getting a B.A. in Applied Ethics to writing for ESPN and completing graduate coursework in counseling psychology. And in that journey, I recognize a lot of what we stand to lose in a world where AI becomes a successful part of our every day lives. And so I do not set out to label AI some kind of evil that needs to be avoided at all costs, but rather something that will likely perform so well that it might take away many of the skills and attributes that made us human. The purpose of The Quiet Cost is to recognize those things, and find ways to keep them, in the age of AI.