This morning, I read a fascinating conversation. It was between two philosophers — Orlando, an academician at the Lucerne School of Art & Design and Oliver, the founder of iA Inc that created the simple software that I use to write nearly every piece of writing I do.
It made me wonder about what it means for AI to evolve from a technology that helps you think faster to a replacement for thinking.
Lots of people argue that AIs are tools like calculators or computers. Using a calculator meant that you had to do less mental math and you could spend more of your focus on the bigger goals of any project that involved numbers. You were still thinking, but you had more time to think in the higher planes of goals like business metrics or budgeting because you were spending less time number-crunching.
The personal computer with spreadsheet software like VisiCalc did a similar thing but to a greater degree.
Today, when you use GPT to generate the crux of an email, you use the prompt as the UI of the tool to outsource some of the thinking like what words to pick. You’re still doing the high-level thinking of what to communicate. And you’re editing the output the AI comes up with. You repeat this process n number of times till you’re ready to copy the message over and hit send.
Now you could argue that across technological shifts, the ever-repeating roles of tool user and editor are simply here to stay, no matter how “intelligent” the technology actually gets. But you could also argue that in addition to the boilerplate generation of your email, an AI agent could take an increasingly bigger role as the editor itself — in that case, you, as the human, are still editing but you’re now editing the editor AI agent’s work. This latter argument essentially is another version of the former, with the caveat that the human editor role keeps getting smaller and more high-level.
If AI becomes smart enough to be the tool user, then instead of using the tool to generate an email, you, as the human, spend your time in the planes that are closer to the higher-level goals of your project (for e.g. getting new business or a job). And guess what you as a human need at your disposal in those higher planes to make your life easier? More tools.
And of course, let’s not forget about the planes where human presence is the whole point.
This is why generalizations like “AI will / will not replace all thinking” don’t actually predict much. If we know anything from the early days of the internet and computers, the future doesn’t always evolve as predicted by technologists and science fiction writers. The real answers are scattered. They’re in the what and where.
In what problems and areas of today do higher-level planes exist where humans can spend time meaningfully to accomplish their goals better, while the lower-level stuff is handled by AI? What experiences of today need the human presence as the key requirement?
Eventually, the complex UI of spreadsheets became a big bottleneck (and still is), and you had to abstract away stuff into apps — accounting apps, payroll apps, budgeting apps etc. In what areas will chat interfaces quickly become complex UIs like spreadsheets asking to be abstracted away into simpler UIs?
These are just a handful of questions and the real predictions for the future are in the small details.
Now, coming back to thinking. The reason I’ll never use AI to write stuff important to me such as these essays is because writing on this medium is a way for me to think out loud. And in these writings, I don’t care about using better words that are not my own. Like many others, over the years, through practice, I’ve gotten better at picking the right words to express my thoughts in writing. And I take pride in that. Writing these essays is like an exercise for me in thinking. Sometimes it takes 30 mins, sometimes it takes 2 hours. The app I write in, iA Writer, is essentially a software typewriter. There’s nothing except my thinking, my words and a blank canvas set in the backdrop of time. And that’s how I like it.
To think is be alive and human. AI doesn’t actually think yet. It imitates. And stuff that I enjoy doing and matters to me, why would I ever outsource to a machine that can’t think?