Artificial Everything

Artificial Everything

Kollin E. Fields

It’s nearly impossible at this point to avoid advertisements for AI assistants, systems, and products. For everything from first dates to road trips to sending emails, it’s no longer only the case that “there’s an app for that,” but rather that some unknown quantity will simply do it for you, instantaneously. One of these recent advertisements in particular caught my attention. A father and daughter are playing outside on a sunny day, betting on whether a snail is faster than a slug. If the girl wins, her dad promises ice cream. The scene is picturesque, inspiring viewers to go outside and play with their kids. And yet in the middle of this heartwarming encounter the dad pulls out his phone to ask his “AI assistant” whether snails are faster than slugs.

This is the corruption of what I call Artificial Everything, captured in a few seconds. His phone — and the artificial world it contains — physically disrupts the space to come between them. It is not necessarily apparent to viewers what is being sold. There is a product, of course, but what promises lie behind it? Time? Speed? Convenience? In the scene, the artificial creeps into the otherwise imaginative and wondrous world of nature and play to shortcut their “aha” moment; the dad in fact deprives his daughter of the chance to authentically discover something for herself. This poignantly captures the illogic of Artificial Everything: saving time for time’s sake. Who can doubt that at the end of his life this father would give anything to go back in time, to savor the moment without distraction? The result of this episode is the opposite of its supposed intent: Instead of genuine discovery, the daughter passively imbibes superficial information from a seemingly omnipotent, artificial knowledge-giver; instead of saving time, the father wastes a precious moment.

Ours has been called an age of anxiety, our children the “anxious generation.” Whether or not our present anxiety is unique in the grand scheme of history doesn’t matter as much as the intensity with which we feel it in these modern times. Scores of books, articles, and podcasts comment on the loneliness and depression of modern man, and are quick to look at technology and a general sense of, ironically, disconnectedness as the culprit. Some of the most popular books of the last few years have as their subject anxiety, isolation, therapy, and the brave new virtual world. Despite a world of more people, faster speeds, and a dizzying menu of options to satisfy our wants, we are, as one commentator notes, “forever elsewhere.” Perhaps we feel more intensely the words of Friedrich Nietzsche’s “modern man” from a previous century: “I don’t know where I am; I am everything that doesn’t know where it is.”

To combat anxiety, we seek out the comfortable; from disconnection we seek connection. The two would, ideally, go hand-in-hand. Authentic connection should be comforting, a refuge from worry and fear. But the age of anxiety is giving way to what I’ll call the age of artificiality. The two have grown up together. If the kids are the anxious generation, our society as a whole is quickly becoming the artificial intergeneration. The word artificial has a variety of connotations. Most obviously, it relates to art. The artificial is something made or produced by the artist. In this sense, artificial is associated with one of its etymological roots: handicraft or craftsman. The artist is a person possessing a certain skill who creates artificial things. This relates to another meaning of the word — unnatural — in the literal sense. The artificial is not found in nature; it wouldn’t exist without the skill of the craftsman. Occasionally the word is used negatively, such as brands claiming their product does not contain anything “artificial.” The implication, then, is that their product is real. Thus in this sense the “artificial” is contrasted with “reality.” But more often than not we tend to view the artificial positively, such as artificial limbs, artificial intelligence, and, paradoxically, artificial reality. But ours is quickly becoming a world of Artificial Everything.

One of the concerns with, for instance, artificial intelligence is that it cheapens the role of the artist, the craftsman. Anyone with a laptop or smartphone can now “write” a hand-tailored novel, “compose” a romantic ballad, or “design” a completely original image. Granted, some are better than others, and we can’t help but notice that AI George Washington has seven fingers on his left hand as he rides an eagle above Yorktown, but the point is that eventually society may neither need nor value the human artist. With the current speed of technology, the artificial may soon appear indistinguishable from the “real,” hence the concept of “deep fakes,” memes, and an increasingly thin line of digital parody. Perhaps we’re not there yet, but Apple TV’s recent film Mountainhead (2025) ominously depicts a world of tech moguls who, over the course of a weekend, conjure global conflict and economic upheaval with nothing more than a few clicks of their smartphone. Indeed, the artificial may soon surpass the real. Cinephiles may recall the Mike Judge film, Idiocracy (2006), whose inhabitants grew to prefer Brawndo over water since Brawndo has electrolytes. The protagonist, who is unwittingly transplanted to this future dystopia, suggests that they instead use water to grow their crops, only to be rebuffed, “You mean like from the toilet?” Will our own artists suffer the same fate of obsolescence? Will we eventually ask where the painters and poets have gone, only to hear in reply, “You mean like from books?”

We are makers of things. We are all artists. The child who ties a kitchen towel around her neck to be a superhero is perhaps the purest artist of all. They create artificial worlds, words, and whimsy. The artificial can of course be beautiful, magical, imaginative, and even intensely helpful to mankind. We would not cut short a child’s play simply because they are not living in “reality.” Neither would we sneer at an artificial limb for not being “the real thing.” The artificial worlds of the artist inspire awe, introspection, and a sense of the transcendent. Nietzsche writes in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) about art as intoxication, a sort of stupor and spell. As “these Dionysian emotions awake, and as they grow in intensity everything subjective vanishes into complete self-forgetfullness.” Going further, he argues that these emotions seek “to destroy the individual and redeem him by a mystic feeling of oneness.” Art and the artificial, then, could in their most noble capacity draw us closer together as humans.

This is not to suggest that fantasies of princesses and dragons must mimic nature — in fact its appeal lies in its unreality — but rather that the apogee of the artificial is found in its transcendent ability to make us more human by tethering us to community across time and space. We should be transformed by the pure experience of art, not further disconnected, burdened, and anxious. A child’s free play, for instance, attunes them to their natural imagination; poetry, literature, and the like compel us to envision a better world and the best in humanity; even binge-watching the latest show can, with the right “basic orientation” described by philosopher Zena Hitz, spark our intellect and help us lead better, more authentic lives. So I don’t suggest that anything artificial is a moral or social negative. We would not desire to live in a world literally “free from all artificial” additives, though perhaps this is prudent with toothpaste and shampoo. The concern in this world of Artificial Everything is that the constructed thing — be it social media, virtual reality, or large language models (LLM), for example — is dramatically diverting us from the supposed destination. It is making us less imaginative, less capable, less social, and less human in a broad sense.

One place to locate this shift, as we saw at the outset, is in the world of advertising. The advent of modern advertising in the early twentieth century rested on promises of enjoyment, connection, and liberation. Whether it was radios, automobiles, creams or salves, the product was marketed as an authentic experience. The radio in the living room created an opportunity for the family to gather around and collectively imagine worlds of cowboys, aliens, cops and robbers. The automobile, according to its marketers, would provide escape from crowded cities and the pall of industrialism. Of course, glossy prints can be deceiving — then as they are now — but the messaging at least attempted to tap into one’s humanity, if only to sell a product. In today’s world of Artificial Everything, the promise is no longer a fuller humanity or an authentic experience; in fact, it’s often the opposite.

In terms of today’s digital Wild West, both the message and the result are that of disconnection and superficiality. “Get a quick answer …” by yourself. “Learn to paint …” alone. Humans have always needed and desired each other, as the history of political thought attests. Aristotle believed us to be “political animals” because we often rise and fall together: We need community. But much of modern marketing implies we don’t even need our fellow humans to aid our wants, desires, and needs. This is because Artificial Everything prizes quantity above all else. More of everything. More images, more information, more content. Faster. Now. Algorithmic overlords create a highly curated menu of choices in a matter of seconds. Lest we pause and reflect on what we just watched, read, or heard, we’re hurried along to the next item from Pandora’s Box of dopamine. There is a tragic irony to the fact that streaming services, for example, autoplay the next show or film before viewers can even read the names of the hundreds of craftsmen whose intellectual and physical labor created the product (in fact, I still haven’t been able to figure out how to actually return to the credits). Perhaps even more concerning is the lack of attention that Artificial Everything has produced in many of us, so much so that a feature film or an entire album seems too cumbersome to endure. There are entire businesses devoted to providing consumers with even shorter versions of the real thing. Miss a game? Watch a five minute recap on YouTube. Unsure if the cinematic juice is worth the squeeze? Scroll through the best scenes on TikTok. The promise is no longer meaningful experiences but rather an artificial world where one need not think, ponder, reflect, or even engage. As the journalist Johann Hari has said, modern technology allows us to pretend that we need nothing more than an isolated room and a screen, “where nothing still or serious” can reach us.

The promise of Artificial Everything is, ironically, time. Grab-and-go processed foods have long promised satiation at half the effort. Pharmaceuticals provide a veneer of health and attraction with a once-daily pill or injection. AI services can read and respond to emails, digest news articles into bullet points, and even write term papers for the labor-averse student. And the endless array of applications and smart technology are supposed to make our lives easier, such that we can lock our doors or start a load of laundry from the comfort of our bed. In the world of physical drudgery that most of our ancestors endured, outsourcing labor and energy in exchange for time seems like a dream come true. For “us moderns” though, the means have become the end. Saving time is, apparently, a good in its own right. We become digital farmers, working every day to store up time in our technological barns, only to let it spoil in wait. It is a challenge to cultivate authentic connection when our curated, online persona makes it seem as though we don’t need each other. And those anxieties that exist beneath the surface? Artificial Everything promises liberation, or at least enough distraction to avoid reality.

As the psychologist Jonathan Haidt demonstrates, modern technology has made us too risk-averse. We helicopter over our children on the playground lest they endure traditional rites of passage such as bruises and scrapes. We are overly concerned about offline safety, while ironically permitting and even encouraging adolescents to roam the recesses of the Internet unencumbered. And of course, it’s not just children and teens who are engrossed in the world of Artificial Everything. To avoid the risk and possible embarrassment of traditional courtship, apps now permit aspiring singles to simply and endlessly swipe their phones to “connect” with a partner. And if this is too much trouble, the seductive world of online pornography and even AI-generated sex captures the hearts and minds of millions more. Social and political polarization drives wanderers to the fringes, finding shallow community — often exclusively online — in echo chambers of extremism. Further exacerbating the problem is a disorienting array of fake news, fake images, and ammunition for outrage. Artificial Everything is inculcating us in blind devotion to expediency, supposed safety, and isolation. At every turn, opportunities are missed. Like C.S. Lewis said, we may find that we lived our lives content to play with mud pies in a slum rather than enjoy a holiday at the sea.

The theologian Francis Schaeffer once asked, How should we then live? Do we throw our phones away in haste, only to realize the next day we can’t get to the store without Apple Maps? Technology is here to stay, and for that matter always has been. Were we able to go back in time we might find ancient dissidents warning about the dangers of the wheel, calendar, or fire. Technology is a major conduit for Artificial Everything, but it is not synonymous with it. Any sort of artificiality that drives us away from human connection, wonder, and awe is part of the problem, whether artificial food, relationships, or intelligence. This does not suppose that time-saving mechanisms are bad in and of themselves. Having Outlook sort my email into categories probably does mean I have more time to spend with my family, read books, go outside, or commune with others. The thin line of Artificial Everything is when those means become the end, when a fake world becomes a golden calf that sacrifices experience and human connection on its alter. We urgently need to restore a world of awe, of healthy risk, of “learning on the job.”

In the Old Testament the author of Ecclesiastes discusses a certain “enjoyment in [our] toil.” Physical and mental labor, the seemingly menial task, and even the modern bugaboo of boredom seem to me to be an essential part of our humanity. They attune us to habits and rhythms, seasons of life. But Artificial Everything threatens to devour these and more in its quest for our control and attention. It feeds on the metaphorical Brawndo we pour over our technological ecosystems each day, often unceasingly from dusk till dawn. But small acts of liberation can make way for restoration, reattuning us to the proper rhythms of life. Surely we can all make time to wait and see whether a snail is faster than a slug.