In Leo Tolstoy’s 19th-century classic “Anna Karenina,” Konstantin Levin is a nobleman who grows disenfranchised with aristocratic life. Levin’s arc — moving to his countryside estate, working alongside peasants and pondering how to apply technological advancement and Western institutions to 19th-century Russia — can be interpreted as attempting to find deeper existential meaning in a rapidly modernizing world.

Romanticizing the past is nothing new. There is a well-deserved place for romanticizing the past in art, politics and the cultural consciousness. 

However, expectations surrounding our own lives diminish our appreciation for the comparatively superior qualities of 21st-century life. 

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Those who’ve accomplished a major goal — getting accepted to USC, for instance — could attest to the fact that no matter how deep the desire to achieve something, once it is achieved, we are not perpetually happy. We quickly move on to the next thing and leave our achievements in the rearview.

From a data-based point of view, technological advancements have undoubtedly made the 21st century the greatest time to be alive in history. At no other point in time has there been less poverty, famine or violence, or more human rights activism, socioeconomic mobility and education since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. 

With my optimistic view of human progress, I find it hard to look at the rise of large language models, like ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok and Claude, and not marvel at their immense potential for humanity.

Yet, like Tolstoy’s Levin, many today are skeptical and scared of rapid advancements in technology. This is understandable – change is scary, especially when it happens so fast. So many of our everyday functions are so easily outsourced to artificial intelligence and LLMs, which are rapidly growing in strength year after year.

My instinctive reaction is to liken these concerns to the ones people had about cars, the radio, computers and the internet. Even digital spreadsheets and the video-editing capabilities of social media apps were called out for making people lose their jobs in a “technology panic.”

What is the point of technological progress if nobody is excited about it? The appeal in romanticizing simpler times is understandable; however, that romanticizing should not come at the cost of undermining the miraculous nature of tools like ChatGPT.

Their use, in domains such as education, has the potential to drive socioeconomic mobility and shatter the barriers for everyone to create whatever they want — the implications of which are nothing short of dizzying and awe-inspiring. 

It is up to us to find the best uses for LLMs and learn how to integrate them into our lives. Generation Alpha, Generation Z and, to a certain extent, millennials are blessed with adapting to technological shifts as a part of their cultural DNA. 

Instead of just worrying about the implications of technology, we should learn how to use it and identify its strengths and flaws. This way, we do our part to make sure we understand its shortcomings and ethical issues based on our use of it, as opposed to fear or panic. 

As we see from the reactions to previous technological progress, things never truly become as bad as they should have, or rarely even are adopted the way they initially seemed they would. Let’s adapt our own expectations based on history — we simply don’t know. 

Let us not forget that LLMs are a solution. And with every solution, comes new problems. Smaller problems are a fair price for fixing bigger problems. We will adapt to the AI age without collapsing the same way we’ve adapted to our living standards becoming superior to any other time in history, and raise our expectations accordingly. Let’s try to enjoy the immediate gains while we can.

In the end of “Anna Karenina,” Levin’s pursuit of simple labor and family brings deeper meaning to his life than the intellectual pursuit of progress. It makes for a fantastic book, filled with excellent ruminations and food for thought. But let’s leave the romanticization of the past to the arts, and not let nostalgia prevent us from moving forward with technology.