One morning, I had a pulling dull feeling in my solar plexus. My mind was troubled with questions of life, the Universe, and AI. It is not the fear of being replaced, no sir. It is an existential problem. If AI performs creative thinking, writes music, poetry, etc, what does it make us? What’s left for us? What makes us special, and distinguished? (Should we be special?) Some many questions to uncover. Let me explore some of them a little.
I started learning the GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology, I use Logseq for my journaling and keeping track of my projects and tasks. Managing it requires skills, practising certain habits and strengthening my decision-making muscle. I am only at the beginning of this journey, yet It already caused a significant positive change in how I do things and vastly reduced the buzzing in my mind. But that’s another story deserving its post. When AI is on every phone and every app, It might be that brain work is no longer involved in journaling, sorting and organising my thoughts, ideas, and life events. I’ll just dump whatever is in my head to my AI manager (or overlord?) and retrieve the next “best” action to take.
“Cool” you might say, one less thing. Yeah, I see your point, we tend to automate and delegate things that “keep us busy”, that are not the deep work we want to be doing. The question is where is this threshold beyond which lies the core skills that give us the cord, the things we do that define us and keep supporting and shaping our personality. I’m talking about such skills as decision-making, creativity broadly and writing, drawing, sketching, composing music and poetry, etc. specifically. I’m talking about mission-critical skills such as communicating ideas and thoughts verbally and in writing; managing time and priorities; cultivating patience and persistence; and defining and shaping who you want to be and what to do in your life.
Offloading these things completely to an external entity might have drastic side effects such as forgetting the knowledge of how to do things that are strongly attributed to humans, becoming weak and dependent on external input and losing self-determination. Practising those skills is as vital in my opinion as lifting weights when we have carriers, covering distance by food even though we have transport and knowing at least the basic ideas about how our bodies work despite having doctors. If we don’t practice these mental exercises, our brains become feeble like our bodies if we never lift a finger.
One similarity between AI and us humans is the process of learning. An AI model is presented with a large dataset of supervised examples so it can learn how to generate the desired output, then these results are refined, and the process continues until the satisfactory level is met. This process shapes the model, making it what it is. We, humans, also shape ourselves by doing certain activities over and over again, sharpening our skills and forming neural paths in our brains.
The point I’m trying to make is that we should be very careful and selective about what we’re delegating to AI or even other human beings, because that decision might play a crucial part in sculpting your brain, i.e. you.
My, let’s call it, anxiety was caused by the idea that to not fall behind, I would have to give up a lot of my habits and skills that I’ve built, and also throw away the tools that I like. Everyone else would use the new shiny AI-powered tools and be better and time management. (Well, not everyone I’m sure, many people won’t change their habits not with AI or a life coach). So I admit, that one aspect that contributed to the anxiety is the mere resistance to change and the sentiment for familiar tools, for which I spent a lot of time to personalise and tailor to my liking. Saying all that, I, nonetheless, believe in the importance of doing certain things the old manual way to facet your brain and maintain its sharpness.
Another thing that bothered me that morning was that big tech would take away any business opportunity from me. I had some faith in developing Google Chrome extensions as a business model, but when I think of AI being everywhere, I imagine, that there will be only one extension, the AI itself. Gemini or ChatGPT or whatever they come up with next.
Interestingly, when I wrote it all down, I saw that these are (hopefully 😅) silly fears, especially the one about the absence of business opportunities. Our ability to change and adapt when we need to is one of the core attributes and skills I talked about earlier; the idea of AI taking over all business opportunities is ridiculous because what we’ve seen with all new technologies is the opposite — the more problems we’ve solved, the more room for more problems we have 😁. The invention of computers (not even the iPad) did not kill using pen and paper notebooks, likewise, the emergence of AI does not have to make traditional note-taking obsolete. And if it does, I will adapt (just have to be selective about what to delegate) or write an app of my own.
Speaking of writing, journaling is a great way to confront my fears and examine them to see if they have a ground at all. And even if they do, reflect on them to find a strategy to mitigate the risks and adapt to the change. When the issue is in the head, the solution can also be found there.
Happy AI age, everyone!
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