the padded cell

Learning with Genies

What skills do we keep when answers are cheap? When genies (or calculators, or GPS, or AI) can do things for us, how do we decide what’s worth learning deeply vs. what we’re happy to delegate? How do we maintain judgment and taste when we can outsource execution? And how do we avoid becoming the humans in Wall-E, and is that even a legit concern?

3 posts in this series

When everyone gets a genie

learning to handle expertise you didn't earn

We’ve always had to figure out who to trust for expertise, but until now, that access wasn’t universal. Used to be the bloke at the pub who ‘knew things,’ or that friend of a friend who could fix computers (me as a kid), or books if you had the patience. Rich people had their ‘real’ experts on call, though Bernie Madoff shows how well that could work out.

The internet changed things, sure. Suddenly you could reach out to actual experts, find communities, and learn from people across the world. But you still needed judgment, because you could also find a community that agreed the earth was flat, so, you know, mixed bag.

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blog 10 min read #thinking-out-loud, #ai, #genie, #learning