Can we afford not to?
Tinkering, thinking and then tinkering some more was the common theme of my childhood. Maybe slightly different to other children like me though was that I wasn't buried in books. I certainly had my books. Beneath my childhood bed lay a book on perhaps every broad category of science from anthropology to astronomy that my finger prints had worn into from countless ‘past my bedtime’ adventures but they were never the centre of my focus and certainly never what took up most of my time.
With unlimited chocolate and sweets a child develops a burning flame of energy so if not on reading books where did I spend it? Dreaming.
As a child my mind was awash with ideas for how things could be better or changed. I would look at something someone was doing and wonder what a better version could be. I would pester and pester the adults around me or anyone who would listen. I asked question after question, the more knowledgeable a person was the more I bothered them.
Computer systems mercifully welcomed my eagerness with open arms. Where my ideas and questions would sometimes get me into trouble computer systems would act as a boundless landscape for me to whisk my brush on too with as broad strokes as I liked. If I broke my computer it never mattered. I could just reinstall it.
As flamboyant as I have painted this picture of my childhood, the reality is much more grounded. For every dream I had perhaps a hundred made no sense at all. This is to say that actually just like every child at the time, I spent most of my time being wrong. I was tortured by systems and designs that seemed impossible to understand and just like every other child I kept going slowly carving out a consciousness that would eventually become who I am today. Not through my achievements and certainly not from having ideas I was right about. We as adults were born from the absence of information. Our natural spirit for discovery and a lot of social conditioning pushes up a sapling through hard and uncomfortable ground so that one day it blooms into a flower.
Today's world branded by twelve zeros wants to cast that away. Twelve zeros is apparently the price for not just who we are now but who everyone else might be in the future. In today's world children ask their chatbot what something is or how it works, the shallowness seeping out of their phones and into them. A meal's worth of information delivered directly to their stomachs perfectly parcelled forgoing the need to chew or question the taste.
Every dream they have, absent of twists and turns leaving instead a few flashes on their screen. As adults we all understand the importance of depth, we live it everyday. Our stories about how something just happened to work or perhaps an unexplained eureka moment. Our dinner time conversations about how we noticed a pattern to when the mailman seems to be in a good or bad mood or the vaguely funny social dynamics the local outdoor cats have. We have these because we lived through our trials. The children of the present are rocketed through their dreams without a single stop to learn anything at all.
Reliant on chatbots for the most basic exploratory questions adults and children alike enter prompts that have no attachment to any foresight, no enrichment of context and no thought to structure, phrasing and narrative. These things so deeply important to their ability to understand and interact with the world have been considered no longer needed. Skills like these wither like unwatered flowers grown through years of experience as a child at a time when our minds were most eager to change and now discarded as an adult right at the moment we are required to carry the world's burdens.
Addressing this means removing the AI companies from the conversation table. The technology is here to stay and we would be foolish to discard the endless hours of ingenuity poured into it misguided or not. However just like all technology it's greatest merit should be that it's non-invasive, that it's existence is only additive. At present these products are actively harming our society and so once a solution can be drawn up it can be pitched to the people that want to provide it to us. If they want to touch every aspect of our lives the price should be not twelve zeros, it should be an enforced focus on helping us all.
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