Will AI make us Dumber?
Learn through the boring.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this blog are entirely my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my current or any previous employer. This blog may also contain links to other websites or resources. I am not responsible for the content on those external sites or any changes that may occur after the publication of my posts.
End Disclaimer
The first job I ever had was making signs in a trailer in the back of the hospital where my dad worked. I was 15. The hospital would call us and tell us they needed a sign made for something. We would cut the plastic for the sign, line it up in the machine, input the lettering, and hold the sign in place while the machine made its rounds, carving the letters into the plastic. Any number of things could and did go wrong- wrong size sheet, misspelling, plastic wasn’t lined up, engraving machine starts to slip. Once, the machine ejected a scrap of plastic like an arrow, which promptly embedded itself in the side of a filing cabinet. Close call. We had a whole garbage can filled with plastic mistakes (good band name?). Over time, I learned to optimise everything- right size, where to hold the sheet, how far from the sides to start, how to avoid plastic projectiles. In short, I got better at my job through repeated rote and mundane processes.
The trailer isn’t there anymore. The sign making machine is gone. There are much better machines now.
Humans don’t learn through the boring as much anymore.
All the jobs I ever had, had a component of the boring and the crappy, which, in certain ways, were integral to learning “the thing”- some work that I had to repeat upteenth times to understand what I was doing. I was building tacit and implicit knowledge. The type of knowledge that’s difficult to explicitly pass down. The “I don’t know how I did it. I just did it” knowledge. The component pieces that help make someone a domain expert over time. When you pay a plumber, electrician, or carpenter $250 for a job that takes them 15 minutes, you are paying for the accumulated knowledge base that allows for the project to take 15 minutes (unless, of course, you’re on the receiving end of a bad asymmetric exchange. )
AI will create levels of abstractions never seen before. Just push a button for all the boring stuff. Entire jobs will become extinct. What gets lost there?
I’m not a troglodyte (debatable…). I’m not lamenting a time gone by. Advancement and Innovation are literally my job. AI is here, only getting better and more expansive. Part of my 9 to 5 is trying to convey this to people- to try and get out in front of it before the avalanche buries them.
AI does rote, repeat processes right now extremely well. What happens when the collective AI starts to make move 37 in every field they are in? Inching closer and closer to the nuance and idiosyncrasies that make a field creative, and at this point, clearly separate the humans from the algos.
Will the utility and automation of AI outweigh what’s being lost? Probably. Maybe. No idea.
But the thing I worry about losing doesnt come from a place bourne out of nostalgia. Increases in AI will operate at higher and higher levels of abstraction. How long until the surgeon just presses “operate”? Maybe that’s a good thing- less mistakes, but then where do all the surgeons go? What is a surgeon that doesn’t operate? The job becomes robot technician.
When I go with my kids to the grocery store, I tell them them to go off and get all the stuff we need for whatever we plan to cook . They do the pre-recipe (pre-algo) work in their heads to know what to find. There is some learning in that process which prepares them for the cooking part- a mental mise en place. Will SpiderGrocerybot(™) change they way they understand cooking? What it means to check for the right smell and ripeness of the ingredients? Will Grocery bots optimise for all these things anyway? What gets lost?
My observations are not new, and certainly not revelatory. Progress happens. Change happens. Shit happens. But there’s never been a time in my existence where an evolving technology could take away whole swaths of a job role, or the job entirely. The industry entirely. I had a guy come up to me at a conference recently, told me that his company does exclusively language translation. I guess he hadn’t heard.
My kids and I like to play with lock picking sets ( b and e- AI job future proofing!), working with the tension wrenches and rake picks, seeing how each movement contributes to getting the pins to line up with the shear line to pop the lock. There is beauty and zen in the process, the steps- what could be seen as boring and mundane, become integral. (Matt Crawford writes about this beautifully in Shop Class as Soulcraft.)
The memory is in the hands- the times at bat for the thing.
Build things with your hands.
Build things with your computer.
Don’t let the rust build up.
Fight the abstraction.
Don’t slow down.