Stripped of intuition, can you even wander?

I didn’t think we were doing very well with technology and building technological intuition¹ prior to AI. We were not, with any degree of consistency or scale, helping people understand how to use technology to augment simple thinking, let alone preparing them to augment their thinking in new and different ways. I look back to the old goals of thought vectors in concept space² and the early computer age ideas. They felt a lot more like helping people become better at doing people stuff. Mainstream AI use feels much more like just giving up on people and hoping that the AI will magically find the answers. Maybe there will be a few AI generals³ shouting commands at the teaming void of AI minions.⁴ There will definitely be meat shields.⁵

The locus of control, of understanding, keeps moving outward. I am 100% certain AI is moving what is understood or thought about beyond the visible horizon for many people, maybe out of our universe. Use AI to do calculator math. AI to write a program that does a worse job providing a solution that was solved by existing tools long ago. AI actions that may or may not use existing tools, but will do so in a way where the human never learns enough to skip the token-hungry AI middleware or to change how they think in the reciprocal push-pull of tool use. AI as the universal solvent that dissolves search, programming, applications, employees. I asked someone what photos they thought would be good to have and they later provided a list ChatGPT created for them.

AI will help build the world’s worst managers by giving them an infinite army of eager AI-servants that glory in whatever work is given. There is no productive friction. It’s just firing off command after command with little understanding of what should be done let alone how it should be done. Make the charts go up! Do the jobs finish before the next command? No. It’s called multitasking! The agents for the agents will sort it out. Lead! Command! Demand without reflection or hesitation. Maximize productivity by firing off 30 commands at once. It is max capitalism without any proletariat who might resist. If we multi-task tokkkeeennnnmaxxx, we can give those commands to as many agents as possible, the super agents can then control the other agents. AI feedback loops spawn like fractals, and we can achieve a scale of token use that proves we are the best.⁶ We already see AI eating both its own head and tail, an ouroboros Möbius strip, as AI creates fake data⁷ to feed models to create more data to improve models. You may already be expanding your own reports with AI to have the readers summarize them with AI. We know this pattern is custom made for disposable assignments in education. It solves the problems of both the students and the teachers.

I know there are ways to learn and improve one’s self in AI interactions. I know there are lots of incredible options to boost people writing their own software and solving their own problems. I believe that everything we incentivize culturally is the opposite of that. Like eating well, exercising, paying attention, resisting the siren song of social media, thinking is harder than not thinking. AI begs you not to think.⁸ I know how to program and AI begs me not to program. Don’t look at the code. AI will get it right if you just feed it a few more console logs rather than looking at them yourself. You’ve got so much other work to do. Don’t worry that the AI confused a > with a < and, if you just looked, you could solve it in seconds. Those details are beneath you. What's a few more tokens? Your attention and time is already too little butter on so much toast.⁹

I say all this as I use AI, as I try to teach others how to use it in ways that help or, at least, do less harm. I think there is some path here and while AI isn’t inevitable, it is unavoidable. The blending of fears between technology and capitalism make sense to me. Can you really resist from within all the layers of the system?¹⁰

I started this post with the intent of doing something around my own problems finding my way without GPS. Clearly, that didn’t happen. I am going to hit publish without really thinking too hard about what did happen. Clearly, I needed to do some venting. I can still see AI as a bag of gold. It could be, with all these possible problems, there’s still plenty of magical things we could do. Will we? If history tells me anything, not most people. But I can try to figure out paths and patterns for myself and for those who are interested. I am not confident that I know the path but I know a direction.