Your piece arrived just as I was reading this passage in Chapter one, where Tocqueville indicates that he will not be engaging with some groups as individuals: "Their implacable prejudices, their uncontrolled passions, their vices, and still more perhaps their savage virtues, consigned them to inevitable destruction. The ruin of these nations began from the day when Europeans landed on their shores; it has proceeded ever since, and we are now witnessing the completion of it. They seem to have been placed by Providence amidst the riches of the New World to enjoy them for a season, and then surrender them" (Chapter 1)
It is interesting to me that elite American education focuses more on Achilles, Hector, and Odysseus than on Pontiac, Tecumseh, and Metacomet. The reasons why are obvious, of course. The most difficult of difficult conversations would have to occur. If anyone could see their way toward teaching the truth of the parts of our founding story that don't have a "good" ending (like emancipation and abolition), I think you could, Brendan, given your warrior background and experience. It uplifts us to face that past and I have found that AI helps a great deal -- it isn't squeamish and there are documents aplenty to be drawn upon.
Brendan, on this idea: "The remedy is to return resistance at the point where it can strengthen the user. This is the task of the philosopher-builder." >
Do you see OpenAI/Anthro/Google taking this seriously in product design? E.g., introducing an intentional "cognitive friction" toggle that forces the user to do more of the heavy lifting?
Today, it's possible of course with system prompts etc. but exposing it or turning up its temperature cuts against the quintessentially American growth engine: user convenience.
The central question here is what makes you you, different from anyone else. Pre-AI, you could point to your individual output, the product of your hands guided by your discretion. Now our hands cannot possibly hope to type faster than an LLM can identify the next token. Output alone is no longer evidence of discretion at work. Where Elena first used AI to more easily arrive at the answers to her practiced lines of thought, she grows to trust that the model intuits the 'correct' questions itself. Then why does journalism need Elena?
For my own work, I try to embrace the friction that resolves each of Tocqueville's fears. It's great that Claude can make me so much more productive, but some of that work builds my own skills and shouldn't be offloaded. The allure of using AI to answer questions that would be intractable without it needs to be resisted by asking whether those questions are even important to me in the first place. I have to license my own journey of discovery, or else I'm just the inefficient bottleneck in the pipeline.
Your piece arrived just as I was reading this passage in Chapter one, where Tocqueville indicates that he will not be engaging with some groups as individuals: "Their implacable prejudices, their uncontrolled passions, their vices, and still more perhaps their savage virtues, consigned them to inevitable destruction. The ruin of these nations began from the day when Europeans landed on their shores; it has proceeded ever since, and we are now witnessing the completion of it. They seem to have been placed by Providence amidst the riches of the New World to enjoy them for a season, and then surrender them" (Chapter 1)
It is interesting to me that elite American education focuses more on Achilles, Hector, and Odysseus than on Pontiac, Tecumseh, and Metacomet. The reasons why are obvious, of course. The most difficult of difficult conversations would have to occur. If anyone could see their way toward teaching the truth of the parts of our founding story that don't have a "good" ending (like emancipation and abolition), I think you could, Brendan, given your warrior background and experience. It uplifts us to face that past and I have found that AI helps a great deal -- it isn't squeamish and there are documents aplenty to be drawn upon.
Brendan, on this idea: "The remedy is to return resistance at the point where it can strengthen the user. This is the task of the philosopher-builder." >
Do you see OpenAI/Anthro/Google taking this seriously in product design? E.g., introducing an intentional "cognitive friction" toggle that forces the user to do more of the heavy lifting?
Today, it's possible of course with system prompts etc. but exposing it or turning up its temperature cuts against the quintessentially American growth engine: user convenience.
The central question here is what makes you you, different from anyone else. Pre-AI, you could point to your individual output, the product of your hands guided by your discretion. Now our hands cannot possibly hope to type faster than an LLM can identify the next token. Output alone is no longer evidence of discretion at work. Where Elena first used AI to more easily arrive at the answers to her practiced lines of thought, she grows to trust that the model intuits the 'correct' questions itself. Then why does journalism need Elena?
For my own work, I try to embrace the friction that resolves each of Tocqueville's fears. It's great that Claude can make me so much more productive, but some of that work builds my own skills and shouldn't be offloaded. The allure of using AI to answer questions that would be intractable without it needs to be resisted by asking whether those questions are even important to me in the first place. I have to license my own journey of discovery, or else I'm just the inefficient bottleneck in the pipeline.