don't become an intellectual tourist

I learned a lot from this Ted talk "How to stop AI from killing your critical thinking" 

With so much AI available at our fingertips it's become clear to me that critical thinking skills are more important than ever. We cannot make the mistake of developing the habit of just accepting what AI tells us and delegating our critical thinking to AI. So this talk resonated with me.

The speaker is polished and in command. He hits us with some home truths:
  • "where the knowledge worker no longer engages with the materials of their craft"
  • "we've become intellectual tourists"
  • we visit, but don't inhabit ideas
  • "we've become middle managers for our own thoughts"
Working with AI requires significant metacognitive reasoning (thinking about your own thinking process), about your task goals, decomposing work, applicability of gen-ai nd your ability to evaluate output. Working directly with the material makes you better at these skills and becomes problematic when the material is intermediated (by ai).

"AI assisted workflows can have profound effects on human thinking."
"When we don't use our brains, we get worse at brain things"

"AI should be a tool for thought". We should prioritize humanistic values.
As a tool for thought AI helps you understand the work, ask the right questions, improve the quality. As opposed to AI doing the work faster and providing all answers.

The product demo the speaker is cool. 
"Cognitively effortful but collaboratively effortless" - love that!
This image shows that the user is directly working with the material and is assisted by ai.
"What would you rather have, a tool that thinks for yo or a tool that makes you think"



"The ability to think well is essential."




This article is also on the same lines and a good read.  


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

angular js protractor e2e cheatsheet

Many from the protractor test suite category detailed task syntax example load page load a page browser.get('yoururl') browser btn actions browser back/forward browser.navigate().back() OR browser.navigate().forward() access elements on page See Protractor API list and examples from Protractors test suite access by angular ngmodel name (must match ngmodel in the html) this is the preferred approach element(by.model('person.name')); access by the css id on the page e.g, #user_name (but this can be brittle) element(by.id('user_name')) access angular binding to get generated value i.e. for {{}} element(by.binding('person.concatName')); access angular repeat list data (must match repeat stmt in the html) See Protractor test suit l...
Read more

angularjs ui-router query string parameter support

angularjs ui-router is pretty cool, we use it in our app now but have not yet used query string parameters (e.g. ?p1=age&p2=height). But now we need to. we're now adding a feature which is basically a report generator and its a good use case for query string parameters once on the page then you're basically in that ui-router "state" users can select filters etc. from dropdowns which will reload the data but should not destroy/recreate any controllers or ui widgets (we stay on the page and do not state transition) yet we do want to update the url for deep links and back button support we don't know the complete list of possible filter choices, but know it should be data driven and will change by report  urls to support this report feature are will be something like thus /reports  /reports/sales  /reports/sales?region=west&time=weeks so we need to use query string parameters Below are some of the things I discovered with ui-router query strin...
Read more

Notes on interview with Kent Beck about AI and why it's like a "genie"

TDD, AI Agents and coding with Kent Beck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSXaxOdVtAQ This podcast was really fun to learn from and I recommend. Kent is famous in the programming world, so his take on AI is worth learning from. Kent says he's spending 6-10 hours a day programming and in 50 years of programming it's the most fun he's had, "its a blast". Kents using agentic tools where it generates a bunch of code from a single prompt. Kent says nobody knows what works so try it all. So we should be experimenting.  Kents tried a number of different languages as he's experimented. Kent thinks of AI as an "unpredictable genie". Its a genie in that "it grants wishes and you wish for something and you get it, but it's not what you actually wanted: it volunteers features, doesn't care about design, willing to cheat (delete/modify tests) there can be some good things with this, but some bad I love this metaphor. I have experienced these aspects o...
Read more