Choosing to Stay Human

A lot of the problem is going to come down to us. To be clear, I am cool with a lot of cognitive surrender. I don’t remember phone numbers anymore because my phone does that for me. I am happy my kids didn’t need to learn cursive. I am fine with calculators doing my daily math and my computer figuring out how to schedule my classes. These were once useful skills, but we were probably right to get rid of them.

AI is different because the technology is general enough that virtually any cognitive task can be offloaded into it to some degree. I don’t want to be too precious about writing: there is no principle that says a polished email draft has to come out of a human mind any more than a column of arithmetic has to. But we don’t want to give up everything, and that we mostly don’t know yet, for any specific task, what is important and what is not. Deciding that is going to be a real challenge.

My north star with technology is “am I making the computer do something useful to somebody?”

Useful, as Ethan Mollick touches on here, is the difference between “AI solved the problem for me” and “a personalized AI taught me this hard thing in a way that stuck for me.”

I’m not gonna dog on anyone who likes to write code. It’s therapeutic, it’s constant problem solving, it forces you to understand how something works.

I think software engineers tend to loudly express strong opinions that don’t meaningfully improve the problems that most people have.

AI, like every other tool, comes down to the human that is wielding it.