Using AI to arrange atoms

Almost everything AI has done for me so far has been arranging bits.

Words, code, documents, images, plans. Information, rearranged. I have built a great deal this year on the back of that and I am not ungrateful for a second.

But bits are cheap and they always were. A bit costs nothing to move and nothing to undo. If I get it wrong I press delete and the world is exactly as it was.

Atoms are different. Atoms cost something to move. They resist you. They stay where you put them.

Look at the last forty years and almost all of our progress has been information. The computer, the internet, the phone, the model. Enormous change, nearly all of it in what we know and how fast we can move it around. Then walk outside. The roads, the houses, the kitchens, the way a thing actually gets built. Much of it looks the way it looked.

What changes that is AI and robotics together. One side knows, the other side moves. Whichever way it lands, utopia or dystopia or the long stretch of ordinary in between, it is the pair of them that takes us there, and the pair of them is coming.

I am not waiting for the robot. I have started three projects that cross the gap the slow way, where I take what I can get out of AI and use it to arrange atoms with my own atoms, which is to say with my own two hands.

They turn out to line up neatly, from the one that stays built to the one that vanishes the moment I stop.

The bookshelf, which would stay built

I put together my first flat-pack furniture recently. Five hours on the first one, an hour on the second, and a whole essay's worth of thinking about pre-drilled holes.

The thing I want next is a bookshelf. Not an assembled one. A built one. Timber, a design, my own holes, something that is in the house in twenty years because I made it.

I am not remotely qualified for that. I do not know what wood to use, how to join it so it does not rack, what it will do when the humidity changes, or how thick a shelf has to be before it stops sagging under books.

All of those are questions with real answers. They are exactly the kind of thing that used to require either a course, a relative who knew, or five years of ruining timber.

That is the part that has changed. Not the sawing. Nobody is sawing for me. The knowing.

Cooking, which lasts an evening

I should admit something here. I am not into food.

I can appreciate a very good meal. I am glad other people are passionate about it. But it is not a thing I want to spend my attention on, and for most of my life a recipe has felt like a list of orders. Do this. Then do this. No reason given. Obey.

Then I started asking AI about cooking instead of following recipes, and it stopped being a ritual and became chemistry.

Why the pan has to be properly hot before anything touches it. What is actually happening when a surface browns, and why it tastes of something the raw version does not. What the salt is doing to the water and to the protein. Why resting meat is not a superstition.

That is science, and science I like enormously. Give me the mechanism and I am interested. Give me an instruction with no mechanism and I am bored within a sentence.

I am still not a good cook. I am making slow progress. But I went from not caring to being genuinely curious, and nothing about me changed. The subject got translated into a language I already think in.

Guitar, which is gone the moment you stop

The last one is the strangest and I think the best.

I have been using AI to help me get better on the guitar, and to work on my singing. Not to generate music, which I have very little interest in. To get better at making it myself.

Here it is not arranging atoms into a fixed thing at all. There is no object at the end. And yet it is unmistakably atoms. Sound is air being pushed around a room. A guitar string and a pair of vocal cords are both moving physical matter in a pattern precise enough that another person's ear turns it into meaning.

A bookshelf stays built for twenty years. A meal lasts an evening. Music exists only while you are making it, and the instant you stop the air goes back exactly where it was.

Which makes it the purest version of the point. Nothing was produced. Nothing was automated. The only thing that changed is what I am capable of doing with my own hands.

What is actually going on

Looking at the three of them together, the pattern is not that AI is doing my physical work.

It is not sawing, cooking or playing. In every case I am still the one moving the atoms, badly and slowly, and getting better.

What it is doing is translating. Woodwork into geometry and load. Cooking into chemistry. Music into pattern and structure, and my own voice into something I can hear properly for the first time. Three subjects I had no natural way into, each rendered in a language I happen to already speak.

The barrier was never the doing. It was the knowing, and the knowing used to be locked up in apprenticeships and courses and other people's heads.

There is a shadow to this, and I wrote about it elsewhere. The same technology that can explain your taste to you can also quietly move it. Moustaches still look funny to me, and that has not shifted. What unsettles me is how many other people stopped finding them funny at the same time, with no vote, no memo, and nobody able to say when they changed their mind.

But this side I have no reservations about at all.

For twenty years the promise was that machines would do the physical work so humans would not have to. What is actually happening in my house is close to the opposite. The machine handles the knowing, and I get to do the work.

I would much rather have it this way round.