Living with AI
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How Do We Live Well in the Age of Artificial Intelligence?
Artificial intelligence has arrived in daily life faster than most of us were ready for. It writes emails, generates images, helps doctors, and consumes enormous amounts of energy, and it is blamed for everything from job loss to the death of art. This colloquy sets aside the noise and asks a quieter, more useful question: How do we live well alongside AI? Over four sessions we will explore what AI actually is (and what it isn’t), reckon honestly with its environmental costs, examine what it means for human creativity and artistry, and look at some of the genuinely remarkable problems it has helped solve. No technical background required or expected.
Eli Baird lives in Brooklin and has spent 20 years building large-scale software systems, most recently as Director of Enterprise Architecture at CHG Healthcare. He has worked closely with AI systems both professionally and in his community work on the Blue Hill Peninsula. He is not here to sell AI or to frighten anyone about it, just to think carefully about it alongside neighbors.
Syllabus/Reading
Session 1: What Is AI? (And What Isn’t It?): Clearing away myths and building a plain-language picture of how these systems actually work
Session 2: The Environmental Ledger: The real energy and water costs of AI, what’s overblown, and where AI may actually help environmental challenges
Session 3: Creativity and the Human Question: AI-generated art, music, and writing; what it means to be a maker in this age; what can’t be replaced
Session 4: The Unsolvable, and the Terrible: Cases where AI has done something genuinely remarkable–protein folding, drug discovery, climate modeling–and where it can be used for the terrible–civilian surveillance, cyber attacks, and war. Returning to our central question: how do we want to live alongside this?
We will post links and readings for each session.
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