AI Saved My Sanity
Finding humanity in an age of AI algorithms
The presentation I made to the AI Portland group on January 9 is reprinted here. I don’t often speak in public about my private life, but to do so was part of a healing journey.
2024 folded itself into two distinct chapters in my life.
On April 14, 2024 Nora bounded into my world, all paws and possibility. Five months later, on September 14, Margaret, my North Star for almost three decades, slipped away.
Between those two dates, I lived in the space between nurturing new life and honoring a fading one. At 67, you think you understand life's rhythms. Then the universe reminds you that you don't.
While my personal world tilted between joy and grief, I found an unexpected anchor in studying Artificial Intelligence. Not because it provided answers, but because it taught me something about change. Like AI, we're all works in progress, learning from each interaction, adapting to new inputs.
In those first few weeks, I was drowning in static. Working with AI became my first lesson in noise reduction - filtering out everything but what I needed to get through each day. As summer turned to fall, I challenged AI systems to be better as they painted, wrote, and reasoned - stumbling, improving, sometimes failing spectacularly. It struck me that grief follows a similar pattern. There's no linear progression, no clear upgrade path. Some days you're Version 2.0, others you're back to debugging the basics.
Watching these systems learn to understand context reminded me that I too was learning a new context for living. Like an AI model being retrained, I was processing new data: how to live alone, how to love what remains, how to integrate loss into my operating system without letting it override everything else.
The most profound parallel emerged in understanding mistakes. In AI, mistakes aren't failures - they're essential feedback loops. My clumsy attempts at moving forward, my days of getting things wrong, weren't failures either. They were my human version of gradient descent, each misstep adjusting my path forward ever so slightly.
Nora, in her canine wisdom, became my real-world validation set. She didn't care if my predictions about the day were accurate. She simply needed me to be present, to engage with the moment's parameters as they existed, not as I wished them to be.
The technology that I studied didn't save me by solving my problems. It saved me by showing me that adaptation isn't just possible - it's fundamental to existence. We're all, human and machine alike, learning to navigate complexity with whatever tools we have at hand.
What fascinates me most as I teach others about AI is how AI has illuminated, rather than diminished, what makes us uniquely human. As these systems become more capable, they make visible the things they cannot replicate - the exquisite complexity of human grief, the warmth of Nora in my lap, the twenty-eight years of shared experiences and incredible memories that Margaret and I built together, cut short.
We often talk about AI in terms of what it can do, but its limitations reveal our superpowers: our ability to find meaning in chaos, to love despite loss, to laugh in the face of uncertainty. While AI can process billions of data points, it takes a human heart to find poetry in the morning light or courage in a dog's unflagging optimism.
I've come to believe that navigating an unknowable future isn't about having all the answers. It's about maintaining our capacity for wonder and possibilities, even when our world has been upended. It's about recognizing that being human means existing in the space between knowing and not knowing, between letting go and holding on.
Margaret understood this instinctively. She approached each day as a prototype, not a final version. "There is no wrong way," she used to say. Now, as I watch AI systems iterate toward understanding, I realize how profound her insight was.
When we release ourselves from the binary of right and wrong, we're free to be works in progress, learning to be better versions of ourselves, one interaction at a time.
The true gift of this technology isn't its ability to replace human experience, but its reminder that growth is neither linear nor predictable. Like an AI model encountering the spaces between certainties, we adapt, we learn, we surprise ourselves with our resilience.
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