In this issue, we dig into the question of how AI affects expertise and skills: how AI affects mastering a complex field like coding, preserving human expertise in the age of AI, and a conversation with Matt Beane about his book, The Skill Code.
AI's impact on skill development: Balancing productivity gains with long-term expertise. Explore how AI changes apprenticeships, challenges traditional learning, and affects industries. Learn strategies to integrate AI while preserving crucial human skills and mentorship.
A conversation with UC Santa Barbara Assistant Professor Matt Beane about his book "The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines."
Artificial intelligence will never understand why I found it important to write this piece today. Why and how I hope I can connect with readers through it. Because only you, my fellow humans, can have similar experiences.
This one is for the people, the humans, the readers with biological eyes and minds. This is not written for the search engines. As I write, I’m not thinking of optimization, keywords, hashtags, or any way to appeal to the machines. Don’t worry, machines, there is already plenty of “content” created solely for you. And the future of the web will be about you creating content for you.
But, today, I hope that you humans will still be able to find this. We still have a hope of connecting human-to-human on the internet today in May 2024. But that will change. The web is already filling up with AI writing. Some of that content is ghost-written for people on their blogs, social media, or news sites. Some of that content is written without any pretense of being authored by a human. It’s out there to try to capture your clicks and attention. It’s out there to game the SEO game on behalf of the AI’s owners.
No one really knows how much of this content is out there today or how much will be in the future. But, given how cheap it is to create, I bet that it will be a lot. I bet it will overwhelm human writing. And I bet it will be so difficult to distinguish who wrote what that we’ll all wonder what it means to read anything on the internet anymore.
The only answer may be that each of us will need an AI to help us make sense of this vast quantity of content. We’ll have agents that scour the internet for something that might appeal to us. Some may not care who or what wrote it. Others may. Some may send agents off to look for something specific. Others may send agents to find something unexpected.
No matter how each of us use our AI agents for discovery, I have a hard time seeing a future in which we won’t need them. As Helen wrote, we will need an AI assistant even if we don’t want them. We will need AI agents to make sense of all the AI-generated content. We call this future the Agentic Web—a future of content created by machines, for machines.
Big Tech will likely sell us on the benefits of personalizing our experience of the web through their AI agents. They will brag about how helpful their AI agents are in sifting through the wreckage of the AI content flood. They’ll tell us that our machine-filtered window on the world makes us more efficient, more valuable. They’ll make it all sound so good that many will forget the joy of serendipitous self-discovery. Many will choose the easy path to just get things done. Many won’t be bothered with the loss of human authenticity and human meaning.
You likely know by now that I am both optimistic and pessimistic about the AI age. I find reasons to be both excited and scared. But I am finding it hard to be optimistic about the Agentic Web. I find countless good ways to use AI, especially for discovery. But abstracting me from genuine human creations—from humans themselves—is not a future I can get excited about.
As I write this, I’m listening to George Michael’s Listen Without Prejudice, Vol. 1. Released in 1990, the album reminds me of the optimism of my college years. The passion of early adult friendships and young love and horniness. Feelings so deep that you wondered if anyone ever felt that way before. The intensity of youth becoming adulthood.
And, yes, dance parties. I still cannot sit still to Freedom! ’90. My feet move. The bass lifts me off my seat. I can’t resist moving. I feel the beat all over my body. Listening today reminds me of past listens. I remember dancing with friends like no one was watching. I remember singing along with everything we had. “I don’t belong to you, you don’t belong to me.”
No machine will ever write that paragraph. No machine will ever read it like you did. You might have smiled along with me. You might have thought, “yea, George wasn’t for me” (how could you?!). But I bet you felt something.
You might have remembered a time. You might have remembered a place. You might have remembered a person. You might have felt something physical. You might have heard the melody in your memory. You might have wondered, why is he writing this?
This is the human experience. We are not computational machines. We are messy, beautiful, organic, unpredictable, emotional beings. Our experience is not just math, it’s not just processed in a computational center. We experience with all of our senses, with all of our bodies, with all of the things around us, with our extended minds. A machine will never understand my extended experience of music or friendship or nature or love.
A machine will never understand why I found it important to write this piece today. Why and how I hope I can connect with readers through it. Because only you, my fellow humans, can have similar experiences. And only you, my fellow humans, can have the empathy to share my experience with me. Only you, my fellow humans, can understand why these memories mean so much to me.
So, while we wait for the machines to flood the internet with layers and layers of content designed to capture the attention of other machines, let’s remember that meaning comes from our physiological response to the world. And while I dream of AI that might help me extend my mind beyond my current experience, it won’t be able to understand my experience. No one really can because no one else is me. But you, my fellow humans, can come close—and the pursuit of sharing our experience with others is one of the great gifts of life.
So, while we watch the World Wide Web morph into the Agentic Web, I’ll be wondering what human webs might emerge. How will we connect and share? What serendipity surfaces will we create and experience? How will we balance the powerful mind extension that machines can offer with the uniquely human extension that comes through our shared experiences and collective intelligence?
The Artificiality Weekend Briefing: About AI, Not Written by AI
