Tag: AI

Thinking Out Loud

The Questions We’ve Stopped Asking

We’ve stopped asking good questions. Not occasionally, not in certain contexts, but systematically. As adults, as a culture, as people who really should know better, we have largely lost the habit of genuine interrogation.

We’ve become obsessed with answers. With certainty. With having a position and defending it rather than honestly examining it.

And the costs are real. We share things without questioning them. We form opinions without interrogating them. We make decisions without asking what we’re actually assuming.

The confident take gets rewarded. The honest admission of uncertainty gets ignored.

This matters more than we’re admitting. Not just for creativity, not just for AI, but for how we live and how we understand the world.

The most intelligent thing a person can do is admit what they don’t know and ask the question that follows from that admission.

We’ve almost entirely forgotten how.

Thinking Out Loud

The Wondering

The machine doesn’t wonder. That’s the thing nobody talks about when they’re busy arguing about whether AI is going to replace us all. It generates. It predicts. It produces fluently and endlessly and without the slightest sign of fatigue.

But it doesn’t lie awake at two in the morning turning a question over and over because it hasn’t found the right answer yet. It doesn’t feel the pull of an idea that keeps returning because it hasn’t been fully understood. It doesn’t sit with something unresolved because the resolution matters.

But I do. And so do you. That wondering, that sustained, sometimes uncomfortable, often inconvenient curiosity about things that don’t have easy answers, that’s not a weakness or an inefficiency. It’s the most human thing we do.

It’s where real creative work comes from. And no matter how fluent the machine gets, that wondering remains stubbornly, irreducibly ours.

Mike

Thinking Out Loud

Learning To Be Second

I worry about my grandchildren inheriting a world where the machine is always the smartest voice in the room.

Not because it isn’t. In many respects it already is. The machine processes faster, knows more, makes fewer errors, and never has an off day. On raw intelligence by most measurable definitions, it’s ahead. That’s just true.

But here’s what I learned in thirty-five years of teaching. The youngsters who developed most weren’t the ones who were always the smartest in the room. They were the ones who were comfortable being second. Who could sit next to someone more capable and learn from them without feeling diminished. Who understood that being outperformed wasn’t the same as being without value.

That capacity, to work alongside something more capable without losing your sense of your own worth and your own contribution, might be the most important thing my grandchildren’s generation needs to develop. And we’re not teaching it.

Mike

Thinking Out Loud

The Taste Question 

“Taste is supposed to be the thing humans bring. We know what we like. We know what feels true. Except… does taste survive when the machine is doing all the heavy lifting? Or does taste become something more like preference, which is a much smaller thing? I could prefer the version where the protagonist is angry over the version where she’s sad. But that’s not taste. That’s whim. Taste is built on knowledge, on pattern recognition across hundreds of books, on instinct honed through years of reading. If the machine has absorbed all that too, then what am I tasting with? My own limitations?”

Mike

A dimly lit government office with a long empty table covered in neatly arranged documents and folders, illuminated by cold fluorescent lights, creating a quiet but unsettling bureaucratic atmosphere.
Posted in AI Experiments

Oulipo and AI: Unleashing Literary Potential

Posted on by Mike

Today I have been exploring ‘Oulipo’, which is short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or “workshop of potential literature”. This was a French literary movement founded in 1960 by writer Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais. The group believed that creative constraints, far from limiting a writer, could unlock new possibilities that free writing would never discover.

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