Keep the Thinking

There is a fear narrative about AI that I think misses the most interesting thing happening. The story goes that we will offload everything to the machine — both the thinking and the doing — and that whatever we get back will be a hollow imitation of what we used to make. Some of this is true. There will be a great deal of work made by people who have abdicated both halves of the job to the agent, and very little of it will be memorable. But the more interesting situation is the one where we keep the thinking and hand off only the doing — and what happens when we do. What happens is more than speed. When you have to describe what you want to the agent — with enough precision that what comes back is what you actually wanted — you begin to think about the thing differently. Description, it turns out, is where the idea often actually gets made. You start by knowing roughly what you want, and the act of articulating it produces a clearer want, which produces a sharper specification, which…