It’s easy to imagine a world where Artificial Intelligence does most of the work that humans used to do. It’s already happening.
A.I. can do a lot! Forbes recognizes The Advantages of Artificial Intelligence in 2024. It’s in our best interest to understand how A.I. is being used and how we can personally use A.I. to become more productive.
Here’s a question. If A.I. is getting so good, why don’t I just let A.I. write these blog posts?
And let me assure you that I haven’t used A.I. at all for the writing on this website!
Still, it’s a good question. I have a couple of responses.
First, I enjoy the thinking and learning process connected to doing the writing myself. One of the reasons I’m writing these blog posts is to get better at expressing myself in writing. I want my thinking to become more clear and authentic.
You could argue that A.I. should be the ultimate shortcut for me. I could just let A.I. do the initial draft of a blog post, and then I could tweak it just a bit to give it my personal touch.
I don’t think so.
Calculators are great tools. But you don’t learn how to do long division by pushing buttons on a calculator. Well, maybe we don’t need to be learning long division anymore! If this is what you were thinking, I refer you to Isaac Asimov’s short story, The Feeling of Power.
There may come a time when A.I. can upload skills into our brains. There may come a time when we no longer have to work so hard to get better at writing. But I assure you we’re not there yet!
I’m all about using A.I. to make our lives easier. Nevertheless, easier is not always better. We tend to learn more when we struggle than when the answers are just handed to us.
Second, no A.I. has been trained from my personal experiences. While it’s easy to imagine an A.I. that is familiar with many of the external facts of my life (who I married, where I live, and the content of my resume), our feelings are not transferable. At least not yet.
Currently, no A.I. knows what I felt the first time I was kissed. (And it’s not what you would expect!) Even if I put this story into words, a potential A.I. would only know the words about the experience. And it would have no clue about the thousands of other unique experiences that I’ve never written a word about!
Our experiences are a big part of what makes us human. We all feel the same emotions, but we experience them in different contexts. We all have different stories associated with the big and small events in our lives.
I can imagine a future where A.I. implants can record our emotions as we live our lives. (The movie Strange Days does a good job of portraying this.) Based on this context, such an A.I. may “understand” more about our personal experiences.
But again, we’re not there yet.
Currently, my desire to get better at writing and my desire to share my personal experiences are two reasons that I do not want to delegate my writing to an A.I. At least for now, no A.I. is going to get it right.
While I certainly expect A.I. to get much better in the near future, I think I’ll be happy to write my own blog posts for quite some time.
Leave a Reply