I hate to be away from my phone, not necessarily because I’m addicted to some apps (maybe true to an extent), but I feel empowered with it. It’s an extension of my brain. I feel smarter with it. Without the phone, I miss a part of my identity that I think is who I am.
Interestingly, very soon it expanded to my computer, for similarly the same reason. Every time I go out to execute a task and make things happen in general, I feel I’m not equipped enough to drive it without my computer in front of me. Partly because work for me has been sitting in front of a machine all day.
What comes as an addition took me by surprise. I did not surely imagine it being an empowering expansion to my brain – but it ended up becoming one. It’s my external monitor. I have attended meetings with it and without it, and hands down it made not just me productive, but gave access to an additional window to do things that shape my identity in an unexpected way.
Lastly, we don’t need to guess who is the new entrant to the list. It’s AI – Gen AI to be specific. Actually, it’s ChatGPT and Perplexity mostly.
Any task I do today – I find myself “instinctively” reaching out to ChatGPT and asking it. Even if I can easily do it myself. Because I tasted a better me thanks to AI. And there’s no going back. It started with basic, monotonous tasks. Gradually, AI became my thinking buddy, reaching a point of advisor in certain areas.
What made me pause and take a step back was when I started offloading my cognitive and creative thinking to AI.
The reason I’m bothered is because I just don’t know what will remain of me now. That’s a real existential crisis. I don’t know why people are not talking about it enough. Maybe they are afraid to. Because just like me, they also tasted a better version of themselves due to the democratization of AI.
Now that it’s started bugging me day in and day out, I’ve started thinking about possible solutions.
The answer that I reached is not easy, but simple. Just like to build muscle you have to hit the gym every day. To stay fit, you have to eat clean. No rocket science. But most people fail to do it. So here’s my solution to this seemingly-trivial-yet-mammoth problem:
1. Build your core and keep strengthening it using AI
Ask this question to yourself: who do you want to be as a person — what values you want to imbibe, what skills you want to possess, and what knowledge you want to store and easily access. We have always been building our core unconsciously, but now let’s do it consciously and thoughtfully. We can write a whole essay on building and reinforcing your core, but for now let’s stick to three things: consume long-form content like books/articles, live and experiment with your learnings, and eventually write about them profusely. To understand what your core looks like, imagine being in a party without your mobile phone or any gadget, and who you would be and what you would be comfortable talking about. If you’re given a white paper in a closed room, again without gadgets, what are a few things you can write pages about without needing any external inputs?
2. Never let AI do these things for you
When you choose to be a master of certain things, don’t let AI do that for you. It’s like going for training to learn and letting someone else do the work for you. You can certainly take help from AI to learn, just like your mentor. If you understand the limitation of AI, you will very well realize it can only say things that have been said so far, maybe with a bit of permutations and combinations. It can’t tell you things that are fresh. But you can do that. AI models, by design, are cursed to say things that make you feel comfortable, unless you can really dig and get the truth. Get that truth and hone your core. And then, when you speak about things around your core, people will see the unique charisma in you, when the rest of the world struggles to stand out with their AI-generated outputs. One thing I know I don’t want AI to do for me is express thoughts (mostly in the form of writing).
3. Dumb by months, smart by year
Let’s face it – you will feel a bit dumb initially. Never measure the outcome of things immediately. When you are learning something, you will make stupid mistakes. If you are trying to learn how to write well, of course, AI will do a far better job than you. That’s okay. Take that pain as a fee for long-term value. Be the dumb guy who shares their half-baked, unstructured ideas with grammatical errors here and there. As long as you keep learning and the rate of errors reduces (thereby reinforcing your core), you are good. One of my crazy predictions is that there shall come a time, very soon, when people will crave flawed human work rather than polished AI work. Who needs a cookie-cutter treatment at the end of the day?
People who would dare to put up their best-yet-flawed work, despite knowing that they can adorn it with AI – yet choose to be humanly flawed and authentic – will be sought after as much as, if not more than, the ultra-smart who know how to unleash AI to change the world (most likely at the cost of losing themselves in the pursuit)
Parth Choudhury 