Self-powered thinking - are you gen AI sober ?

I got to know Luc Julia through the excellent Arte series called “Silicon Fucking Valley”. Luc Julia is Chief Scientist Officer at Renault, co-inventor of Siri and so French in many respects. His last book “IA génératives, pas créatives. L'intelligence artificielle n'existe (toujours) pas” acts like an ice-bucket to make you reconsider the generative AI hype. I stumbled upon an interesting parallel (on page 168) between self-powered commuting and self-powered thinking. The idea : tomorrow, we’ll be asked to do a wise usage of generative AI (because it is so resource intensive) the way we are asked to do a wise usage of our cars today (because it's bad for the environment). 

Self-powered commute (bike, walk) was a popular concept when I enjoyed promoting bike commuting at the Google Paris office. The idea was to challenge employees to use their own self and human power to move from point A to B, provided they could physically (and geographically). After all, Paris is a small town, and for those who live not too far from the office, commuting without burning external energy can be a wise option, with multiple benefits on city noise, resource consumption, personal cost and health. Observing the amount of bike commuters in the city today, the concept of self-powered commute has gained popularity. What if self-powered thinking became a thing in the coming years the way self-powered commute did?

“Faisons une analogie avec la voiture et les transports. Dans notre confort et notre fainéantise, nous utilisons parfois notre voiture alors que nous pourrions prendre les transports en commun. Ou faire le trajet à pied. Aujourd'hui notre utilisation de la voiture est de plus en plus responsable. Il devrait en être de même pour les IA génératives.”

Laziness is the underlying promise of generative AI even more so now that we talk about agents doing everything for you. It’s not me saying that, it’s Luc Julia implying it. Our ability to think could become atrophied the same way that our ability to move can be atrophied relying too much on cars or not self powered commute options, aka our legs. We have been there at least once : leveraging chatbots when producing written content takes seconds versus a long and painful intellectual effort so why go through the pain ? Sitting comfortably in your car to get some bread downtown instead of walking triggers the exact same mechanism as relying on Gemini to write your essay or your cover letter. Plain laziness. 

But in this analogy, your hands (that type and write) are your legs. If your legs just push the pedals the way our hands engineer a few prompts, it’s probable that their muscles become weaker over time. The large consumer success of chatGPT and friends is certainly due to this idea shared by Paul Graham in this article : “The reason so many people have trouble writing is that it's fundamentally difficult. To write well you have to think clearly, and thinking clearly is hard.” 

For many good reasons people are dependent on their cars. The car tech has become commoditized and now the real luxury is to not have a car because you live in city centers and can enjoy multiple commuting options. As someone living in city centers, you’ll enjoy the ability to walk more, ride more than anyone else. So you’ll maintain your muscles in good working conditions. If you have a pre-existing, trained ability to write, or simply the consciousness that it does matter, you’ll also maintain your writing and thus thinking ability in good conditions. Hypothesis : a cutting edge technology, when adopted widely can become something that discriminates : the more people will leverage gen AI to write on their behalf, the less they’ll be able to write and thus to think. Quoting again the same article : “So a world divided into writes and write-nots is more dangerous than it sounds. It will be a world of thinks and think-nots.”

Let’s be optimistic, tomorrow, there will be as many writing challenges as there are walking challenges today. 

And every step will be a word.

Restons optimistes, il y a fort à parier que des entrepreneurs organiseront des “writing challenges” sur le modèle des “walking challenges” qui ont gagné en popularité pendant les différents confinements.

Et chaque pas sera un mot.