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This is May 2024: Humanity is in the early stages of a standoff with generative AI, which offers methods through which visual art, writing, music, and computer code can be created by a machine in seconds with the simplest of prompts

Most of us are still in the sizing-up phase for generative AI, staring warily at a technology that’s been hyped as world-changing and job-disrupting (even, some proponents argue, potentially civilization-ending), and been foisted on the public in a very short period of time. It’s a weird, exhausting, exciting, even tense moment. Enter: THE CRUSHER.

There is about a zero percent chance that the company did not understand the optics of releasing this ad at this moment. Apple is among the most sophisticated and moneyed corporations in all the world.

this time, it’s hard to like what the company is showing us. People are angry. One commenter on X called the ad “heartbreaking.

Although watching things explode might be fun, it’s less fun when a multitrillion-dollar tech corporation is the one destroying tools, instruments, and other objects of human expression and creativity.

Apple is a great technology company, but it is a legendary marketer. Its ads, its slickly produced keynotes, and even its retail stores succeed because they offer a vision of the company’s products as tools that give us, the consumers, power.

The third-order annoyance is in the genre. Apple has essentially aped a popular format of “crushing” videos on TikTok, wherein hydraulic presses are employed to obliterate everyday objects for the pleasure of idle scrollers.

It’s unclear whether some of the ad might have been created with CGI, but Apple could easily round up tens of thousands of dollars of expensive equipment and destroy it all on a whim. However small, the ad is a symbol of the company’s dominance.

The iPad was one of Steve Jobs’s final products, one he believed could become as popular and perhaps as transformative as cars. That vision hasn’t panned out. The iPad hasn’t killed books, televisions, or even the iPhone

The iPad is, potentially, a creative tool. It’s also an expensive luxury device whose cheaper iterations, at least, are vessels for letting your kid watch Cocomelon so they don’t melt down in public, reading self-help books on a plane, or opting for more pixels and better resolution whilst consuming content on the toilet.

Odds are, people aren’t really furious at Apple on behalf of the trumpeters—they’re mad because the ad says something about the balance of power

it is easy to be aghast at the idea that AI will wipe out human creativity with cheap synthetic waste.

The fundamental flaw of Apple’s commercial is that it is a display of force that reminds us about this sleight of hand. We are not the powerful entity in this relationship. The creative potential we feel when we pick up one of their shiny devices is actually on loan. At the end of the day, it belongs to Apple, the destroyer.

I’m standing before them not as an ambassador of certainty or a font of unassailable verities but as an emissary of doubt. I want to give them intelligent questions, not final answers. I want to teach them how much they have to learn — and how much they will always have to learn.

each component of it was about the same quality: humility.

The grammar-and-spelling bit was about surrendering to an established and easily understood way of doing things that eschewed wild individualism in favor of a common mode of communication. It showed respect for tradition, which is a force that binds us, a folding of the self into a greater whole

The voices bit — well, that’s obvious. It’s a reminder that we share the stages of our communities, our countries, our worlds, with many other actors and should conduct ourselves in a manner that recognizes this fact. A

I’d also been delivering that spiel for more than two years before I realized that humility is the antidote to grievance.

We live in an era defined and overwhelmed by grievance — by too many Americans’ obsession with how they’ve been wronged and their insistence on wallowing in ire

This anger reflects a pessimism that previous generations didn’t feel

They promote a self-obsession at odds with community, civility, comity and compromise. It’s a problem of humility.

They elevated how they viewed the world and what they wanted over tradition, institutional stability, law, order.

The Jan. 6 insurrectionists were delusional, frenzied, savage. But above all, they were unhumble. They decided that they held the truth, no matter all the evidence to the contrary.

anti-Trumps will be our salvation, and I say that not along partisan or ideological lines. I’m talking about character and how a society holds itself together.

It does that with concern for the common good, with respect for the institutions and procedures that protect that and with political leaders who ideally embody those traits or at least promote them.

He was fond of quoting Philippians 2:3, which he invoked as a lodestar for his administration. “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit,” it says. “Rather, in humility value others above yourself.”

Governing, as opposed to demagoguery, is about earning others’ trust and cooperation. Exhibiting a willingness to listen to and to hear them goes a long way toward that.

“Insight and knowledge come from curiosity and humility,” Mr. Baker wrote in a 2022 book, “Results,” coauthored with his chief of staff, Steve Kadish, a Democrat. “Snap judgments — about people or ideas — are fueled by arrogance and conceit. They create blind spots and missed opportunities. Good ideas and interesting ways to accomplish goals in public life exist all over the place if you have the will, the curiosity, and the humility to find them.”

‘Yes, there’s demanding, but there’s also asking,’” he recalled. “And one is not the enemy of the other. People don’t like being accused, people don’t like being condemned, people don’t like being alienated. It’s a matter of conversation and persuasion.”

the message delivered by Loretta Ross, a longtime racial justice and human rights advocate, through her teaching, public speaking and writing. Troubled by the frequent targeting and pillorying of people on social media, she urged the practice of calling in rather than calling out those who’ve upset you. “Call-outs make people fearful of being targeted,” she wrote in a guest essay for Times Opinion. “People avoid meaningful conversations when hypervigilant perfectionists point out apparent mistakes, feeding the cannibalistic maw of the cancel culture.” Instead, she advised, engage them. If you believe they need enlightenment, try that route, “without the self-indulgence of drama,” she wrote.

She was also recognizing other people’s right to disagree — to live differently, to talk differently. Pluralism is as much about that as it is about a multiracial, multifaith, multigender splendor.

Tolerance shares DNA with respect. It recognizes that other people have rights and inherent value even when we disagree vehemently with them.

we mustn’t treat every wound, every obstacle, as some cosmic outrage or mortal danger. We mustn’t lose sight of the struggle, imperfection and randomness of life. We mustn’t overstate our vulnerability and exaggerate our due.

While grievance blows our concerns out of proportion, humility puts them in perspective. While grievance reduces the people with whom we disagree to caricature, humility acknowledges that they’re every bit as complex as we are — with as much of a stake in creating a more perfect union.