We Have Been Here Before

Last week I confessed to you that a small piece of software gave me back my confidence to write. I want to stay in that country a little longer, because the moment I say the word AI out loud in my community, I feel a particular temperature drop in the room.

You know the one. Some of you are the one.

I hear it from women I love and respect. Women over fifty, over sixty, over seventy, who have earned every ounce of their scepticism. I don't trust it. It's not for us. It doesn't sound like me — it sounds like a young man in a hoodie who has never once been ignored in a meeting or talked over at a dinner party. Our voice isn't in that machine. Our whole lives aren't in that machine. And I want to say, before I say anything else: you are not wrong to feel that. The suspicion is not silly. It is not you failing to keep up. It is, quite often, wisdom doing exactly its job, standing at the threshold of a new thing and asking, and who exactly does this serve? 

But I have lived long enough now to notice something, and I think it's worth us sitting with it together. I have felt this temperature drop before. Not about this. About other things. And so, I suspect, have you.

We have been here before.

Every time the world has changed its shape, we have stood at the door, afraid. It is not a flaw in us. It is one of the oldest and most human things we do.

Think of the people who watched the first great machines arrive in the mills and the factories — the industrial revolution, we call it now, tidily, from a safe distance. But live inside it, and it was anything but tidy. It was the roar of something enormous arriving, and with it the certain, cold fear: the machines will take our work. The machines will take over. There will be no place left for a pair of human hands. People smashed the looms. They were not foolish. They were frightened, and some of what they feared came true, and some of it never did, and the world went on and became, not a paradise, I won't insult you, but something, on balance, that most of us would not trade back.

And I don't even need to reach so far back. I only have to reach as far as our own lives.

Do you remember how frightened we were of social media? I do. I remember friends of mine — clever, capable women — who were genuinely afraid to put a single photograph online. They'll steal my face. They'll find my grandchildren. Nothing good happens in there. I remember the hand-wringing, the newspaper columns, the certainty in some quarters that this was simply the end of real human connection, that we would all disappear into our little glowing rectangles and never look each other in the eye again. 

And here is the honest, complicated truth: they were half right. That's the part nobody wants to admit. The fearful ones are almost never entirely wrong. Social media did cost us things. It did steal some of our attention, some of our peace, and, yes, some of our privacy. But it also carried me to my community. It carried me to some of you. The very room we are sitting in together right now, this letter reaching your kitchen on a Sunday morning, that exists because we did not, in the end, let the fear have the final word. We kept a wary eye open, and we walked through the door. Both. At the same time. 

That, I've come to think, is the whole art of it. Not blind trust. Not blanket refusal. Something harder and older and much more like wisdom: 

Keep your wise head, and walk in anyway.

Because here is what I want to gently push back on, sister to sister. When we say our voice isn't in that machine — we are right, and we are also handing something away. If the women who are suspicious all stay outside, then of course the room fills up with the voices that stayed inside. The machine learns from who shows up. If we decide in advance that this is not for us, we guarantee the very thing we fear: that it will be built without us, that it will never learn our cadence, our humour, our hard-won way of seeing. The way to make sure our voice is represented is not to withhold it. It is, carefully and on our own terms, to bring it. 

I am not asking you to trust anything. I would not trust it blindly myself, and I've told you as much. I am asking you to notice the shape of the fear — to recognise it as the same old visitor who came knocking at the mill door, and again when the first mobile phones appeared, and again when we were all told the internet would rot our brains. Fear at the threshold of a new thing is not a signal that the thing is evil. It is only a signal that the thing is new. Those are not the same, though at our age we have every excuse for confusing them, because we are tired, and we have been sold a great many shiny things that turned out to be junk.

So hold both. Hold the scepticism — it is a gift, keep it sharp. And hold the door open just wide enough to look inside before you decide. The women who came before us did not survive a changing world by refusing to look at it. They survived by looking at it very hard, taking what served them, leaving what didn't, and never once mistaking their fear for a fact.

We have stood at this door before. We are still here. That is not an accident — it is a skill, and it is ours.

1. When you imagine saying the word "AI" out loud in a room of women you love — where do you feel that temperature drop in your own body, and whose voice is it that goes quiet first: yours, or someone you're bracing to disappoint?

2. I name the art as "keep your wise head, and walk in anyway." Think of a threshold you once stood at, frightened — social media, a smartphone, something else entirely. What did you take with you through that door, and what did you rightly leave outside?

Routines and Rituals That Held Me This Week

Two rituals this week, and they are secretly the same lesson wearing different clothes: letting something work on me while I do absolutely nothing. The first is my weekly sauna — I sit in the heat and I am forced, gloriously, to just sit. No refusing, no rushing, no proving. The second is my Normatec boot massage, those space-age compression boots that squeeze the tiredness out of my legs while I lie there like a queen and let the machine do the tending. Yes — a machine. I am aware of the irony, and I am thoroughly enjoying it. Both of them teach me the thing my wary old head keeps needing to relearn: that some good things only reach you once you stop struggling and let them.