#02: AI + Thinking

AI is awesome, but...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is awesome. There are countless places where we interact with AI every day unknowingly and a fast-growing number of AI use cases I look to spin up in my day-to-day life. Here’s a few examples of how I incorporate AI into my personal and professional life.

Personal:

• Travel Recommendations/Itinerary Creation – Why hunt through a ton of ad-infested travel pages when AI can rank the top spots for you?

• Personal Finance Guidance – I’ve uploaded my expenses to a GPT, provided context on my lifestyle, and asked for advice on how to improve my budgeting/spend more wisely.

• Medical Advice – Well uh, maybe I shouldn’t do this (yet). But instead of searching through pages of Google wondering which “medical publication” has the least bad prognosis, you get hit head on with an answer.

Professional:

• Idea Generation – This comes in the way of writing, new partnerships, or general solutions to problems I’m tackling.

• Content Generation – I’ve had a GPT spin up plenty of content for SEO strategies, as well as pictures to test on an e-commerce product page.

• Manual Tasks – This is the big one. I’ll rely on a few AI SaaS tools to do grunt work that 1) I’m not good at in the first place and 2) Takes a crazy amount of time out of my schedule.

AI allows me to figure out what the hell I want to do in the first place, get things done quicker, and it does this all in an effective/efficient manner than if I had to do them myself.

But there’s one thing that surfaces each time I thank the OpenAI and Anthropic lords: I am so thankful I know how to do this if AI didn’t exist.

As technology has advanced over the years, there’s been countless tasks that have been rendered obsolete, as a machine takes its place. AI is the process of a machine thinking like a human, right? I’m thankful I’m old enough to have learned how to “think like a human”.

If I didn’t know how to think like a human, how would I know how to properly edit a written piece spun out by ChatGPT? (Well, what I usually do is drop the writing in humanly.io to make the ChatGPT more “human-sounding”). But how do I know what human-sounding is?

I think that’s my point. All the things I listed that I “use” AI for, I used to do myself. Meaning I know how to do them.

Imagine sitting in an English class in high school today. You’ve been assigned a 5-page essay to complete by the end of week. Ten years ago, that would lead to a stomach churn, but now, you get AI to write it for you. Why wouldn’t you? It makes your life “easier”.

But you wouldn’t learn how to write that essay. And knowing how to write that essay may influence you positively in so many ways that you don’t realize. Maybe it enhances your critical thinking skills. Maybe you develop an ability to perform under pressure as you procrastinated to the last moment to complete the assignment. Maybe you developed perseverance from the task, which helps you in other avenues of your life.

I’m all for prompt engineering, leading the way for human learning and increasing our collective efficiency. It’s how we all move forward. But let’s find a way to keep the “thinking” in it.