Artificial Knowledge
Jurassic Park holds up.
I mean that not only in a holy-cow-this-mix-of-anamtronics-and-CGI-is-actually-passable-in-2024 kind of way but also in a this-movie-has-some-oddly-prescient-things-to-say-about-AI kind of way.
One of the many iconic lines comes from Dr. Ian Malcolm: "your scientists were so preoccupied over whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." While you could abstract an entire AI dissertation out of that line alone, I'm interested in the exchange right before:
Ian Malcolm: If I may, if I may. Uh, I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're, that you're using here. It didn't require any discipline to attain it. You know, you read what others had done, and you, and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility… for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses, uh, to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew it, you had, you've patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunch box, and now (bangs the table) you're selling it, you wanna sell it, well.
John Hammond: I don't think you're giving us our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody has ever done before.
Ian Malcolm: Yeah, yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied over whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
(Jeff Golblum's patented "uhs" left in out of respect for both the art and the artist)
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You didn't earn the knowledge for yourself. That, better than anything else I've come across, captures my concern with the wrong type of AI usage.
Artificial Intelligence begets Artificial Knowledge.
Clicking a button to get the thing done for you feels like a productivity hack, but it may be just that: a hack. If it doesn't require discipline to get a thing, if the knowledge isn't earned, it likely will be of superficial impact.
Use AI, yes, but with intention and as a tool. If you don't actually need to learn how to do the thing, it can be great! But if something needs to be internalized, a machine "learning" it on your behalf and predicting the next logical step is no substitute for the frustrating and honest work of actually growing and connecting your neurons. Think.
The struggle, folks. I'm a played out record on a thrift shop player with a worn out needle, but I'm not going to stop: there is value in the struggle.
Earn the knowledge by struggling to attain it, lest you inadvertently create a hellscape of reincarnated dinosaurs.