Mom, Meet Claude
Me and Mom, circa 1980
Last night I had a dream about my mom.
She died almost 18 years ago from cancer. She would have been turning 70 next month.
I still dream about her regularly, and lately I've been wondering what kind of 70 year old she'd be. My father-in-law is in his 70s and fully leaning into AI - curious, engaged, figuring it out. Would she be like that? Or would she be the person who powers up her computer a few times a week to check email and buy stupid stuff on eBay - which, honestly, is exactly what she was doing before she got sick. I genuinely have no idea. And I find myself wishing I could find out. Sometimes she's sick in the dream. Sometimes she's not. Last night was one of those in-between ones - she seemed okay but there was something going on with her health. I never quite know how to feel when I wake up from those.
Anyway. The dream.
But first - a quick aside. I usually have multiple dreams a night, and I remember most of them. It always surprises me when people say they never remember their dreams - that's wild to me. I actually downloaded an app today called DreamApp to start tracking them, and made my first entry about last night's dreams - including this one.
Here's the part that made me laugh when I realized it: DreamApp uses AI to interpret your dreams. I didn't know that when I downloaded it. So I had a dream where my mom ran away from AI, logged it into an app to track it, and then found out the app was going to use AI to tell me what it meant. Completely accidental, totally perfect. The app had some interesting takes - something about unresolved feelings, processing grief, the tension between my past and how I live now. It wasn't wrong. I'm not going to get too deep into all of it here, but let's just say it gave me enough to think about that I'm writing this post.
The dream.
In it, my mom had a side business. She called it POW - Pam On Wallcoverings. (Her name was Pam.) She never actually did anything like that in real life, but she was always full of ideas for things she wanted to do someday. She always talked about wanting to start a hotdog cart. Never did it. POW felt very in that same spirit - a dream she was actually chasing this time, at least in my dream.
The business had a website, and the website was terrible. I mean really bad. Couldn't even do what she needed it to do.
So naturally, I jumped in to help. I told her I could fix it up, that I use AI all the time for this kind of stuff, that it would be easy. I'd help her set up her Google Business page, get her SEO optimized - after I explained what SEO is, of course - and get her phone ringing off the hook. And to drive the point home, I pulled out a voice recorder app to interview her about the business.
She completely freaked out.
Like - ran away terrified. Not "I don't understand this" terrified. Full "get that thing away from me" terrified. Which honestly surprised dream-me, but when I woke up and thought about it, it made a lot of sense.
Here's the thing: I use AI so constantly now that I barely think about it. Claude is basically my co-pilot for half my day - writing, thinking through problems, drafting things. ChatGPT still gets a workout. Gemini's in the mix. I'm writing code with Claude Code and wondering how I ever did it without AI assist. It's just part of how I operate now.
But to someone from a different generation? Someone who didn't live long enough to watch this thing actually arrive and quietly take over everything? I genuinely don't know how she would have taken it. Would she have been curious? Would she have thought it was the devil? Would she have figured it out and loved it, or would she have been the person at Thanksgiving going "I just don't trust it"?
I have no idea. And that's a weird feeling.
My mom was practical. She wasn't especially tech-phobic - she figured things out when she needed to. But AI isn't just "new technology." It's a little hard to explain even to people who are alive and living through the rollout. Trying to explain a voice recorder app that feeds into an AI that can summarize your interview and help you write copy for your wallcovering business... I mean, that's a lot.
In the dream, she just ran. I think my brain was being honest with me there.
I miss her. I wish I could actually interview her about POW. I wish I could show her what I do now and watch her face while she tried to process it. I'd love to know if she'd think it was cool or terrifying or both.
Probably both. That feels right.
And then I woke up and opened my laptop and the first thing I did was ask Claude something. I don't even remember what. That's kind of the point.
I've been thinking about that a lot today. Not in a "AI is going to destroy us" way - I'm not there. But I do wonder sometimes if I've just... stopped noticing how much I've handed over. My writing process, my research, my code, the way I think through problems. There's an AI in the loop on almost all of it now. And most days that feels like a superpower. Some days it feels like something else I can't quite name.
Where is this all going? Honestly I don't know, and I'm not sure anyone does - including the people building it. The world is moving fast in a direction that even the optimists seem a little nervous about. I'm not wringing my hands over it, but I'm also not totally certain I'd be able to recognize it if we crossed some line we shouldn't have.
Maybe that's what the dream was actually about. Not my mom being afraid of a voice recorder app. Maybe my subconscious just needed to put a face on a feeling I've been carrying around without really looking at it.
She never got her hotdog cart. She had ideas she never got to chase. And here I am with more tools than I know what to do with, using them so automatically I forget they're there.
I don't think she was telling me to stop. But maybe she was telling me to pay attention.
Miss you, Mom. Pretty sure you would have had opinions about all of this.