Odongo POD

How, then, shall we live our lives now? I watched an American professor cry on a podcast, and I could not help shedding a tear myself. He was describing a student who had broken down in his class. With AI now able to solve mathematical equations, she said, her life had lost its meaning. We derive meaning in life from what we do. A teacher teaches. A writer writes. An artisan crafts. Politicians lie. In 2013, 2017 and 2022, I kept asking why Raila could not simply retire and leave us the hell alone. The answer was always the same: “Then what will he do with his life? Retirement might even hasten his death.” Fair enough. He never retired. He died last October, still in the game, still doing the one thing that gave his life its shape. Ted Malanda, that finest sage of the Royal Wanga kingdom bloodline, has often wondered why our parents in the village insist on farming. It makes no economic sense to pour so many resources into tired, unyielding soil, only to harvest two or three sacks of maize that would cost less at the shop. Dairy farmers will tell you how much it takes to coax a single litre of milk out of a Friesian cow. Quitting and buying packet milk makes more sense. I told Ted that village farming doesn't have to make sense, because it isn't a balance-sheet exercise. People spend half the morning on the farm looking for meaning. My old man in the village likes his cows, and not so much for the milk. As a child, I sold that milk, usually 10 to 15 litres from his two productive cows. I doubt the old man needed the Sh150 to Sh200 I brought home. But through it, I learned something. Maybe how to sell. Maybe where food comes from. Or maybe it simply kept me busy and productive through this boring, monotonous thing called life. Wherever you end up in life, by design or by fate, you try to derive meaning from what you do. Sometimes it makes no sense, and it does not have to. We acquire skills, knowledge and abilities to make money, and also to fill our days. We were hunters and gatherers living in small communes. Then we became large tribes. Along the way came international trade, slavery, the Industrial Revolution, colonialism and the spread of capitalism, and each change in how we lived changed us as human beings. One of the last chapters of late-stage capitalism is the atomisation of the human tribe. Across the West, country after country laments how much less communal it has become. In Japan and Korea, the isolation deepens every year. Kenya is on the same road. We spend less time with our extended families, and the nuclear family is not doing much better. The internet changed how we relate, too. In America, people under 40 increasingly meet their partners online, and the same will happen here. The internet has shortened our attention spans, made us angrier and left us constantly hungry for validation, which is unhealthy in more realms of life than I care to go into. And now, out of nowhere, comes AI. Every invention before it either improved our tools or sharpened our skills. The car was an upgrade on the horse. The aeroplane was an upgrade on the ship, especially when speed mattered. The computer revolutionised world trade. Even the calculator, which took arithmetic off our hands, still needed a mind to tell it what to calculate. These machines extended the body and lent the brain a hand. No invention ever set out to replace the human brain itself. That is why AI has made me sadder over the past year. As a tool, it is remarkably efficient at monotonous work: emails, proposals, CVs, cover letters. I use it to edit some of my own writing, and it is very good at catching the typos and glaring grammatical errors I rarely bother to proofread before I post. But I have been thinking about the other side of AI. When Arsenal played Paris Saint-Germain in the Champions League final, I watched the game at a friend’s house. We were a roomful of Arsenal fans, hoping against hope that the one trophy missing from our cabinet would finally come home. During the breaks, the designated DJ played stock Arsenal anthems that sounded AI-generated. I did not mind; I was only passing through. Then she played a song that sounded like Rihanna. “Wait, is that Rihanna?” I asked. She said yes. I told her it sounded like AI. She went to check and came back unsure: “Maybe it could be Rihanna...” It was AI, obviously. The song was tolerable to the average ear, and she played it again and again, the way DJs still spin Fracas and Drygin’s Ni Gani Kali Kati ya Man U na Arsenali. We lost on penalties, but that is a grief for another column. What saddened me that Saturday morning (the game kicked off in the morning in my time zone) was how comfortable everyone was with AI music. I have a neighbour who listens only to AI music and watches only AI reels and short AI clips. He sometimes shares them with me gleefully, and because he doesn't know what I do for a living, he expects me to share his delight. This is why I pity many creatives. Our belief that we are superior to machines will be our undoing, because superiority counts for little when nobody is buying. Creatives are not the problem. Consumers are. From the 1960s through the 1970s and into the 1980s, bands played every instrument when they performed. There is a 1975 video of TPOK Jazz performing one of my favourites, Chérie Bondowé. I love that raw, unvarnished version on YouTube, especially the way Franco enters with his guitar just as the song turns on its head. Jazz itself had been big and mainstream for decades. The European and American rock bands of the 1960s and 1970s were made up of people who, besides singing, played an instrument: drums, bass, rhythm or lead guitar, trumpet. Within the band, people wrote and arranged the songs themselves. Progressively, the computer took over the hard work and gave us pop music, and we never looked back. We still listen to the old music out of nostalgia, but I doubt the best jazz band in the world could fill a stadium the way Bahati and Diana can. In the coming years, AI artists and AI record labels will emerge, and we'll debate who produces the best beats. People with a musical ear will command AI to outdo their own creativity. Either way, the next Rihanna or Beyoncé may well be a machine. Hollywood will be one of the biggest casualties. We forget that Hollywood grew out of the stage and passed through many eras: silent film, the arrival of sound, black and white, colour, and the high-tech spectacle of Star Wars. Along the way, it became the home of human stories. Through films like The Shawshank Redemption and Forrest Gump, and countless others, Hollywood told us something about human nature. The films, the stories behind them, and their making became stories in their own right. AI holds a repository of nearly all recorded human knowledge and could, in theory, produce something slicker than House of Cards or Game of Thrones at a fraction of the budget. One of my favourite films is Good Will Hunting. In one scene, the late Robin Williams and Matt Damon are talking, and Williams, by most accounts improvising, describes how his character’s late wife used to fart in her sleep. He never told her, and the habit only endeared her to him more. Through that one memory, we understand how her death shaped the man. That kind of improvisation is deeply human. AI cannot do it without sounding contrived. Human creativity draws on human experience. When I sit down to write, I draw on stories accumulated from many people. Lived experience. And because real life is sometimes stranger than fiction, we sometimes stumble upon truly good stories. I think of the popular fiction of Sidney Sheldon and Jeffrey Archer. Now and then you met a character so original that, years later, you understand they must have existed in real life. The problem lies on the consuming side. If people are content to play FIFA on a screen instead of kicking a real ball, even our stories will matter less and less. We are at the tail end of an era in which people read for knowledge. If the internet made us dumber, I do not know what AI will do to us collectively in 15 years. The evidence is already piling up. The OECD’s most recent survey of adult skills found literacy falling or stagnating in most of the countries it tested, and in several rich countries, IQ scores that climbed for most of the twentieth century have begun to slide. You can see it in the steadily declining quality of online debate. When I was young, we had uncles with nothing more than a high school certificate who were well read and had the intellectual mettle to outmatch the average university graduate. Knowledge back then was not merely a ticket to employment. People read Achebe and understood what was going on. People read Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and knew what was going on. So my sadness is this: we no longer have any incentive to write, and others have no incentive to read us. In the end, true creatives will become like jazz musicians. They still exist, playing to niche audiences, and their genre accounts for about one per cent of music sales in a year. AI will take jobs and livelihoods; that's already underway. The greater loss is harder to count. A machine that thinks for us leaves us with less reason to think, and I do not know what becomes of an unthinking humanity. Which brings me back to the student who cried in that professor’s class, and to the question in the title. I do not have a tidy answer. I suspect it looks something like my old man and his cows. He likes them, and the milk was never really the point. Perhaps the rest of us will have to learn the same lesson: keep writing, singing, reading and thinking, even when the machine can do it faster and cheaper, because the doing is where the meaning lives. Whether enough of us will bother is another matter