Letters to my sons
A collection of thoughts and lessons I've learned along the way for my little men,
and anyone else that's interested.
My sons,
The age of AI has brought with it many conveniences, productivity improvements, and new capabilities. Those that have wholeheartedly embraced the AI native life have seen drastic changes to every facet of their daily experience. Not only has AI changed the pace at which we do things, but for AI natives, it has changed the very nature of what we do, and has brought so many things that were once impossible within reach.
Gone are the days of needing to spend countless hours poring through bespoke documents to gain understanding, or the days of requiring a doctor to help diagnose a wide range of common maladies. Didn’t study graphic design but want to create beautiful and professional custom images and photo edits? AI can do that for you. Didn’t study music composition but want to record a song of your choice complete with full instrumentation? No problem.
Sounds magical, doesn’t it?
The dangers of magic
It is very tempting to outsource more and more to our AI agents. Model builders are consistently and rapidly outdoing one another with more powerful, more capable, more flexible models being released at a blazingly fast cadence. New capabilities are popping up everywhere. From reading and summarizing your documents to crafting responses to emails, from calendar management to creating and scheduling events, from building powerpoint presentations to writing code for you, these agents are no longer simply automatons that do exactly as they’re told.
Through the magic of large datasets and huge power-thirsty data centers, agents feel intelligent. They seem to be able to apply thoughtfulness, reasoning, and even empathy and compassion in their interactions with us.
And they’re helpful. Oh so helpful.
Agents seem like the perfect companion for us - super capable, very obedient, able to “remember” our preferences, able to adjust themselves at our whim. And so before long, we find ourselves depending on them, offloading more and more of our daily productivity to them. This is all fine and good, as long as we vehemently keep one thing in mind:
We cannot allow agents to replace our thinking.
It’s a slippery slope to go from asking the agent to put together a framing document for you to complete to asking the agent to write the document for you altogether. But if we give up our thinking to the agents, it’s game over.
The last bastion: writing
Writing has always been one of modern man’s superpowers. Not only did writing allow our ancestors to communicate thoughts and ideas at a scale never before possible, its very medium forced them to slow down and to carefully consider that which they were writing.
In its early forms, writing was expensive - ink, parchment, quills, storage - all of these were cost prohibitive, so they naturally steered us towards deep thought. As the cost of the medium dropped (we have the printing press to thank for that), the value in the thought behind the words steadily rose.
As AI improves and threatens to subsume our thought, we have an existential requirement to resist. We must resist the urge to have AI writing on our behalf for fear that it will silently expand to take over thinking on our behalf.
The benefits of writing
While there are many perils to outsourcing our writing, there are a number of outsized positive benefits to doing the writing ourselves.
- Writing forces clarity. Writing narratives is hard. Weaving the story in a coherent manner requires skill, practice, and effort. This is a good thing. The act of writing will force the writer to think and to synthesize much more deeply than any other communication mechanism.
- Writing increases information density. By writing long form prose on one’s own, one is forced to truly understand a given topic before putting it to paper.
- Writing tells a story. Storytelling is how our species communicates and inspires. Crafting a narrative requires the writer to deeply understand how the various points intersect so that they can take the reader on a journey.
As our world becomes more automated and runs at a daily increasing pace, it is tempting to lean further and give up writing. Resist that urge. For it is only by holding firmly to the thing that is uniquely ours - our thoughts - that we continue to stay in the drivers seat. It is only by thoughtfully crafting our words that we are able to inspire. And it is only by inspiring that we are able to change the world.