Can AI help us find the "Tragic Optimism"?

Life thrives in constraints. A vine grows stronger when it meets a wall. A river finds its path by meeting resistance.

But can the existential questions posed by AI make our lives more meaningful? Can we be replaced by AI and still remain relevant? Can being worthless make our lives better?

Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who founded logotherapy after surviving the holocaust, discovered something profound in the concentration camps: meaning exists independent of circumstances. His book, "Man's Search for Meaning" details how survival in the concentration camps hinged on finding a reason to live that made the present suffering bearable.

This realization becomes startlingly relevant as we build machines that can think, create, and perhaps one day, feel.

When ChatGPT writes a poem or Midjourney paints a sunset, we're forced to question what makes our own creations meaningful. Is it the output that matters, or the invisible thread of consciousness behind it?

The Mirror Effect

As paradoxical as it sounds, this disruption might be the very thing that pushes us toward finding deeper meaning when everything else becomes redundant.

This is where Frankl's insights become profound. He spoke of finding meaning through:

• Creating something meaningful

• Experiencing something valuable

• Finding purpose in suffering

AI pushes us toward all three, albeit in unexpected ways.

The Meaningful Inefficiency

When everything can be automated, what do we choose to create by hand?

You may ask a photographer why they still click pictures when AI can generate perfect images, or a writer why they still write when AI can regurgitate a million words faster, and you’ll hear, "It's not about the result, but the presence in the process." There’s a reason why we still run marathons, write poetry, cook food, travel, and whatnot.

This is meaning-making in its purest form: choosing the harder path not because it's better, but because the process itself is valuable.

The Weight of Choice

In concentration camps, Frankl observed that even when everything was taken away, the freedom to choose one's attitude remained. Those who maintained a sense of purpose, no matter how small, had better chances of survival than those who lost hope.

Today, as AI offers to optimize every choice, and automate every task, we face a different kind of freedom: the choice to choose.

Do we let algorithms decide what we read, who we meet, what we create? Or do we deliberately choose the unoptimized path? The meaningful path isn't always the efficient one.

Here's where it gets interesting: AI might help us find meaning not by providing answers, but by forcing us to ask better questions:

• When a machine can write a perfect sonnet, what makes your imperfect poem worth writing?

• When AI can optimize your schedule for maximum productivity, what makes a spontaneous conversation worth having?

• When algorithms can predict your next thought, what makes thinking it through yourself valuable?

The Path Forward

Meaning, as Frankl wrote, often emerges from the space between tragedy and opportunity. AI presents both. It threatens to automate away human capability while simultaneously pushing us to discover what automation can never touch.

The key isn't to resist AI or to embrace it blindly, but to use it as Frankl used his camp experiences as a lens through which to see human potential more clearly.

As AI masters the human tasks, we're free to focus on what makes them meaningfully human.

AI is forcing us to answer the question:

What makes a life worth living when everything can be automated?

The answer, perhaps, lies not in what we can do better than machines, but in what we choose to do differently because we're human.