Live Fully and Embrace AI

The Author Hanging with an AI

I read the NYT piece, "AI Is Coming for the Coders Who Wrote it," and found it both irritating and intellectually hollow. The author warns of a host of illiteracies coming with AI: innumeracy, AI as a college 'cheat code', and the end of the arts. Somehow the computer coders are also going to become obsolete because of AI. Yet it's clear that the writer knows little about coding and assumes it is a rarified and difficult skill.

He laments that we can now analyze a spreadsheet and get a summary without digging in and adding and subtracting every row, as if numerical fluency hinged on fourth-grade arithmetic. Reasoning about the data in a spreadsheet is not measured by our ability to tally cells any more than writing is proven by following grammar rules.

In her memoir, Blue Nights, Joan Didion wrote:

“If I had stayed in Sacramento and gone to school I might have learned to subtract, a skill that remains unmastered.”

Her point was not that arithmetic is unimportant, but that living is key. She wrote about listening in on conversations at the psychiatric hospital she haunted when other kids were being drilled in arithmetic. She built her foundation of greatness by living fully, and also happened to have an uncanny gift of writing, which brought her words to the rest of us.

The article quotes an Anthropic executive, who says, "We don't know how AI works." Yet we do. Large neural networks train on our written and visual records using statistical methods. They predict words and images based on learned patterns. We don't see every internal calculation, but the process--layers of weighted connections, back propagation, loss minimization--is well understood. The opacity of a response doesn't erase our grasp of the underlying math.

In his novel, "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy," Douglas Adams created the joke that the answer to life the universe and everything is 42. Earth--our own earth where we live-- is a computer designed to discover the underlying question. I think that living our lives on the planet is the spark that we bring to AI. Living is our domain, with or without AI. It's output is only meaningful when we ask the AI questions, see what it responds, and interpret it.

AI won't replace those who built it or those who wield it to explain their dashboards, summarize readings, or write essays. It will crowd out those who refuse to use it. It will be our tool to perform the mundane tasks behind our work. It will amplify our writing, sharpen our reasoning, and help us reach beyond our personal limitations. I include myself in this category: I composed this essay with the prompt: "Read this, and help me write it so that Joan Didion would be pleased." Embrace AI: It will amplify your talents whether you are a coder, writer, mathematician, or someone living life. It offers surprises and of elevates your work to higher places than if you tried to do it all within your own limitations.