Tag: Technology

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 Question They’ll Ask

The question I most want my grandchildren to be able to answer isn’t what can AI do. It’s what should it do. And why. And for whom.

What can AI do is a technical question. It has technical answers, and those answers are changing so fast that anything true today may be obsolete by the time my grandchildren are old enough to act on it.

What should it do is a human question. It requires judgment, values, an understanding of what kind of world we want to live in and what we’re willing to sacrifice to get there. It requires the ability to weigh competing interests and sit with difficult trade-offs without rushing to easy answers.

That question doesn’t have a syllabus. It can’t be taught through a worksheet or assessed through an exam. It’s learned through conversation, through exposure to difficult ideas, through being encouraged to think rather than just to answer.

If we don’t give our grandchildren the tools to ask it, we’ve failed them. Regardless of how good their AI skills are.

Mike

Thinking Out Loud

The Vanishing Act 

“What if the machine is actually better at both writing and editing than I am? Not by accident, but genuinely. Better prose. Better structure. Better at catching what doesn’t work. I want to sit with that uncomfortable thought for a moment instead of rushing past it. If that’s true, then what am I doing here? I’m not the writer. I’m not the editor. So what role am I actually playing? Maybe the answer is that I’m becoming something we haven’t quite named yet. A curator of possibility, sure, but that feels too grand for what might actually be happening. Maybe I’m just the one who says yes or no. And maybe that’s enough.”

Mike

Thinking Out Loud

Curation as Creation

“Here’s what we don’t talk about enough: curation is a creative act. Every museum curator, every anthology editor, every person who says ‘this matters and that doesn’t’ is making a generative choice. When I work with an AI, I’m curating possibility. The machine offers, I select. I arrange. I decide what the reader sees and in what order and at what rhythm. That’s not passive consumption. That’s authorship of a different kind, and it’s legitimate. The editor’s eye, the editor’s judgment, the editor’s taste: these are not afterthoughts. They’re the thing itself.”

Mike

Whimsical cartoon illustration of a flustered AI robot surrounded by chaotic tasks, including scattered paperwork, a globe covered in notes, a sock drawer labelled “Gravity”, a “Global Domination – Oops!” control panel, a sprinkler spraying water, and an open sourdough recipe book, suggesting humorous incompetence rather than world domination.
Posted in AI and Creativity

Exploring AI’s Thoughts: Questions They Dislike

Posted on by Mike

I recently discovered that in the dashboard of my blog WordPress put in suggested writing prompts. I thought it might be fun to put one of these prompts to three of my favourite chatbots, Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT. The prompt was:

What is one question you hate to be asked? Explain.

Continue reading “Exploring AI’s Thoughts: Questions They Dislike” →