Silver wedding

Two common complaints about time are: “If I could turn back the clock …” and “If I knew then what I know now …” Both reflect the fact that wisdom is hard won and tends to arrive with a tinge of regret: if only I’d been aware of this essential truth sooner, how much richer my life might have been. The appeal of AI is that you can skip all that laborious thinking time by letting a computer do it for you. All these statements have at their root the false belief that the quickest route to your destination is the most rewarding.

Twenty-five years ago today I married Magteld. Had I known at the time that we would barely get halfway to our silver wedding before she died of a catastrophic illness, I doubt I’d have put anything like as much effort into our marriage or asked her to be my wife at all. The memories of our years together would have been riddled with anxiety if we’d been aware how fast the clock was ticking. And only a masochist would have knowingly taken on the task of bringing up our children single-handed, through the challenging teenage years, while dealing with the pain of her absence every day.

We tend to grow more cautious with experience, and often for the better. But the idea that we would make better decisions with foreknowledge is a fallacy. Magteld and I assumed that our silver wedding would be marked with dinner in a gleaming restaurant or a weekend in a brick-paved Mediterranean city with our beautiful children. Nowadays I would probably have asked AI to conjure a rendering of what it might look like. When we were first married I looked ahead to this day in the hope that it would be a celebration of enduring love. For the last 12 years it has been a marker of resilience and gratitude for the joy we felt then. Joy that would not have possible if we’d been able to see further down the road. And a love that burned so fiercely that its embers can still warm my heart.

It’s become a cliché to say that the journey is as important as the destination. I would put it more strongly than that: how you get there is all that matters, because the ultimate destination is somewhere none of us wants to be. That is one reason why AI is such a hateful development: it turns the act of creation into a dead, detached, passive process, a road with no bumps. A time killer, not a time saver. Life is not meant to be flown over or pre-packaged and polished for your convenience. The straight line is the worst way to travel between two points. If I’ve gained one piece of wisdom in the last 25 years, it’s to look back on every missed step, every enforced detour, every abandoned path and see it as part of the route that brought me here. With love, with agony, and mostly without regret.