How Should We Approach AI?

We all have a role to play in stewarding these technologies so that we, not machines, are shaping our future.

In today’s fast-paced, hyped-up world, tools like artificial intelligence and big data are evolving at an ever-faster pace, changing the way we live, work, and play. A freight train, runaway, hurtling down the track. This calls for immediate pause, discernment and wisdom. It calls for something beyond just being informed.

And it means we need the human touch even more, and not less, and that all of us have a role to play in stewarding these technologies so that we are shaping our future, not machines.

In his 2008 article in The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr warned us about the downsides of technology when he penned the article that led to his Pulitzer-nominated book, The Shallows.

“Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains.”

Today, we could ask, Is AI making us Stupid?

We need to ask these questions if we are to find answers.

We must be engaged and involved.

Tools like AI and machine learning need human intelligence to shape and guide their evolution. Thus, we all need to better understand these technologies so that we can discern how they are and will influence every facet of our world, so that we can play our role in how these technologies will develop.

This requires each of us to be great thinkers, leaders, and communicators who ask the crucial questions, who dig deep to find answers, and who facilitate the Great Conversation that must continue to happen.

The impact of technologies like AI is so vast and wide, spanning all facets of human civilization, it requires more than just a few people in elite positions to guide them. We must all ask questions; we must work together to understand these technologies to make sure they are developing to benefit humans first. This requires entering the realm of the Great Conversation, as practiced in days past, when people dialogued in the civic square, wrestled with ideas, and worked to shape the future so that we all flourish.

Today, it’s difficult to find useful information about the meaning of the Great Conversation. In its most basic sense, it’s an ongoing conversation about the world’s greatest ideas and questions of humanity, which builds on prior conversations that have been going on for thousands of years.

Like agile or design thinking, these conversations are iterative and build upon each other, and deepen inquiry. Robert M. Hutchins and Mortimer Adler coined the term Great Conversation in the 1950s.

To continue conversations from the past requires one to read the literature of the past. This is a lost art. So too, many of the great tools of writing have been lost, and thus so too the tools of learning are lost.

Are we running ahead too fast, not thinking about the consequences?

To gain also means to lose. A beginning requires an ending. While we gain efficiencies and conveniences that allow us to put less effort into various tasks, from simple to complex, we also allow our brains to do less work, where skills atrophy. This is especially true of AI.

We need to ask these kinds of questions because AI is here to stay.

AI adoption in business has grown dramatically: In 2022, the annual global corporate investment in artificial intelligence was $276.24 B, a dramatic increase from 2020 when it was $153.63 B. In 2013 it was just $16.95 B. This is according to data from NetBase Quid via AI Index Report (2023), accessed at https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/corporate-investment-in-artificial-intelligence-by-type . This data is expressed in US dollars, adjusted for inflation.

Information and data, in all shapes and sizes, comes at us from every direction. In fact, today’s culture feels like an episode of Fast and Furious.

Therein lies the problem.

In a time when we need to think deeply about these things, it’s even more difficult than ever to find clarity. Instead, our minds are in a constant state of overwhelm; logic and decision-making skills blunted by the noise.

With the layers of information piling on, wave after wave, we are prone to amnesia because we no longer see what came before, nor do we see the present. It’s as though we are trapped in the future, with huge gaps of crucial information missing. This, despite being awash in vast amounts of data.

While technology has been around as long as humans have been walking the planet, leading to great advancements, it comes at a cost.

This is what Carr spoke about. We don’t read deeply anymore. Most of us only tolerate brief chunks of information, preferring visuals. Visual information eclipses text, from art to 3D to video to Virtual reality. This comes with a price. Without deep reading, our thinking suffers. We flit from one dopamine fix to another, grazing from headline to headline, never savoring. We are more prone to manipulation and making mistakes from a lack of knowledge or from jumping to conclusions.

We forget that “to be informed is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about,” states Mortimer Adler.

We worship technology, I fear, forgetting how infinitely intelligent humans are, in realms we have yet to discover. “Science has not been able, nor will it ever be able, to verify, to refute, or to improve upon, that declaration…..in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.”

Thankfully, there is a Renaissance happening.

This is where the craft of writing, with its focus on thinking, grappling with ideas and words, and communicating clearly, is needed more than ever. And each of us can take part. We only need to embrace the lost tools of writing – tools built upon reading in a literary and linguistic sense, tools that embrace the technical aspects of grammar and theoretical ideas, so that these tools can be put to effective use in the Great Conversation of our day. We need to deeply understand the nuances of our words and how words shape ideas that lead to outcomes. We need more conversations, real conversations.

It all starts with caring, connecting and communication.

Won’t you join me?

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