AI Can't Fix the 6 Train

The AI advertisements sat above eye level while I held on to the metal bar and stood wedged between two subway riders on the 6 train. Promises of ease and prosperity…more productivity…more sales…buy the story, buy the product, and a better life awaits. And then the train had stopped between stations for no obvious reason, and it smelled the way it smelled over 20 years ago.

I hadn’t been to New York City in a very long time. But for five days this summer, for Max’s sixteenth birthday, we went back. I wanted to show him where his father and I used to be, before Max existed. I felt Peter’s presence and I expected that. What I didn’t expect was that the city felt unfamiliar to me anyway. The streets were the same but I wasn’t. In a flash of time, I had a husband, then no husband. I had a tiny baby and now I have a kid who’s taller than me. I went back to the place that shaped me and now I’ve found it completely intact and completely uninterested in me. Something about that is almost a relief.

For background: Peter and I met in NYC in 1999. We lived in a loft a block away from the World Trade Center. After getting married we moved out of the city on August 25, 2001. Rent was too high so Chicago seemed like a more affordable idea, and I had family and friends there. A couple of weeks after we moved, the towers were decimated and the city was forever transformed. I watched in horror on TV, from a new address 800 miles away. I saw the destruction of our beloved neighborhood on a screen. It was surreal.

I’ve got a lot to process about this trip, but one thing is clear: five days in New York and I didn’t think about using AI once. I work in it. Half my job is conversation design for AI experiences. None of it crossed my mind, except when it was selling itself to me from the inside of a moving train.

OpenAI, Replit, LangChain, Genspark, and other startups I’ve already lost track of, each one with grand promises and tidy, profitable outcomes. All of them bolted to the dirtiest, oldest, most unfixable system in the city. But the 6 train at rush hour is a fact of life that no one’s technology has ever fixed. To me it seems as if all that advertising says the industry has more money than product right now. When you can barely tell the companies apart, they’ve stopped selling the product and started paying to be the name people remember. They’re in a mindshare fight.

I wondered about who their audience is, because nobody pitches a developer tool to the tired masses on the Broadway local. Those ads aim at everyone, which means the plan shifted from selling to businesses toward becoming a daily habit for regular people. They want to be the thing we reach for without thinking.

The location of these ads is the most interesting thing. They’re selling “frictionlessness” from inside the most friction-fraught system in the city. They pitch products claiming to be faster, easier, and smoother. They paid for thousands of impressions only to prove the point that some friction doesn’t move, no matter how much money you throw at it.

People notice the ads but maybe not in the way the companies would like. Someone altered headline copy where the original headline said “ONE PROMPT, JOB DONE!” They pasted a “G” where the “D” was. The sizing and font style was perfect. “JOB GONE” brought the ad back to reality for 99% of us and my ever-so-perceptive GenZ son caught on, laughed, and took a picture. He understood and appreciated the subtle gesture of activism.

Anyway, I don’t see these AI ads at home. I work remotely and I drive when I need to. In Chicago, any sales pitch on a billboard or the side of a bus flies past, and then it’s behind me. But on the NYC subway it was three feet away from my face while I sweated through my t-shirt, as the train either went nowhere or careened through tunnels like an ancient roller coaster.

At least the subway is honest. It has no intentions of making your life easier. It’s loud, hot and dirty and doesn’t care that you have somewhere to be. Grief runs on the same schedule. It stops between stations with no announcement. No one ships an update that moves it along.

Ultimately I brought Max there hoping to fill in some blanks around his personal history with the knowledge of what happened before - so when he’s ready, he can shape what happens after. I also hoped the city would seep into his bones the way it did for me and Peter: the energy, the creativity, the joy, the wins, the losses; the addiction to living in such a way that you become the person you were meant to be.

While waiting for our flight back to Chicago at the newly tricked out LaGuardia Airport, I asked Max what he thought of the trip. He said “NYC is where it’s at!” And I have to agree.