There are many reasons an issue like this is a bad idea. Let’s focus on two.
First, AI can whip up something like this in a jiffy.
In 30 seconds, it can summon the data of the internet, scrape together the activities humans in a place called San Diego have publicly declared to have enjoyed, and spit out a biblical list of commonly recommended things. You want 20? Seven thousand? How many em-dashes? A lot?
Here’s why we do this anyway: AI can’t hear music.
Its throat doesn’t tighten with the rise of the symphony’s violins at Rady Shell. A song can’t remind them of their mom or a breakup. It can describe it using a data set of past descriptions of music, even rearrange those words in new ways. But AI can’t feel any of these things.
It never stood astounded beneath Salk Institute’s brutalist science castle and said, “This makes me feel so small and I like it.” It never felt the vibration of 20,000 Wave fans stomping and cheering in its chest, and the almost too-big emotion that massive energy creates when you feel it in person.
AI can describe an experience by corresponding words previously arranged around a human experience—but it can’t have an experience. It can list a place to visit, but it can’t process wonder. Only you and I can do that.
We have a basic set of analog tools that make us humans: sight, sound, smell, taste, feeling.
This issue was assembled using the wildly inefficient process of being humans in San Diego. To make this, we had to live here. We had to try things firsthand, over and over, learn the city’s nuances, adapt to its changes, experience its greatness and its meh-ness. We had to find parking, wait in line, pay too much, be impressed, be surprised, be disappointed, go back, and make judgment calls.
Then, as San Diego Magazine, we had to answer one question honestly: Would we recommend these things to a friend?
If the answer was yes, it made the list.
The second reason this issue was a bad idea is that 101 is not enough. San Diego isn’t a city you finish. It’s a place you keep discovering, revising, and arguing over. This list isn’t definitive. It is meant to be lived with, debated, dog-eared, and added to. It reflects the habits, quirks, guts, and glory that make this place feel like home.
So yes, on its face, this issue is a ridiculous idea.
PARTNER CONTENT
And that’s our job: to pay attention and chronicle the unruly, specific, deeply human, and slower business of being alive in San Diego.
