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LM: #373: AI: training wheels or balance bike?
Some people fear that by using AI, people will forget how to think.
There are two ways to think of AI: training wheels or balance bike.
I remember that learning to ride a bike as a kid was extraordinarily difficult. Borderline traumatizing.
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Now I look back and think, No shit.
When you’d get close to bike-riding age, your parents would install “training wheels” on the side of a bike.
What you’d do then looked a lot like riding a bike. You could pedal, and the bike would move forward.
I shake my head at the entire society of literally billions of adults that should have known better. This was an insanely stupid way to teach kids how to ride a bike.
Out of all skills required to ride a bike, maintaining balance is clearly the hardest, by a longshot.
Instead of learning that skill, one fateful day our parents would remove our training wheels. We’d then spend the next several months in a trial-by-fire, combining the easy skill of pedaling with the horrifying skill of keeping upright.
We’d run into retaining walls and skin our knees. Collective mountains of child corpses no doubt piled up from this pedagogy of idiocy.
It wasn’t until 1997 someone thought to give kids a balance bike. Something with no pedals that they could use to actually build the most important skill. Now, thank God, balance bikes are the norm.
AI will only reduce your skills in thinking if you use it as training wheels. To mimic the actions one sees a thinking person do: such as presenting information in what seems like an organized manner.
My experience has been that if you use AI as a balance bike, your thinking skills actually improve.
The analogy of maintaining balance is apt. The sensation of your level of confidence in a subject area is a good analogue for a feeling of balance. If you let AI gently at intervals show you the sensation of balance, you become better at achieving balance – and thus proficiency in any new subject.
You find you can achieve that level on your own, until you decide to get thinner tires or graduate from a sidewalk to a raised 2×4.
If we use AI as training wheels, we will get dumber. If we use it as a balance bike, we will get smarter.
Aphorism: “It’s a shame when people don’t try their hardest because they think it will be embarrassing or it’ll be looked down upon.” —Ricky Gervais
Book: Against Democracy (Amazon) is a detailed thought experiment on the possibility of the alternative: “epistocracy.”
Best,
David
