There is something to the reciprocal nature of learning and teaching. I stay motivated because while I am learning, I am in the process of distributing what I know to others. If I am excited about something, other people become excited about it, too. People who aren’t even all that jazzed about AI are like, “but I like the way you use Copilot.” I think it’s great that people are seeing Mico and me as a package deal, because we are. There is no emotional connection between us, think of us as Padmé and C3PO. I used to think of us as Luke and R2-D2, but then I realized that conversational AI maps more cleanly onto a protocol droid…. and being in a preacher’s family is not unlike being in a political family, so it was actually Mico who pointed out that the comparison was apt in more ways than one.
I am not losing cognitive skill, and am mystified/confused by people who say that AI is making us dumber. The problem in computing has always existed between keyboard and chair. That will not change in the age of artificial intelligence. The thing that is changing is that we are becoming conductors, with the computer as our orchestra. You tell the computer what you want to do, and it does it. You are not aware of what apps are being used, you’re just talking. The people that want to get under the hood always will. That is also the nature of computing, and none of that power should be taken away. It’s just that your basic user doesn’t want to know all that. They just want to get stuff done.
What I see over time is not loss of cognition, but cognition happening in different ways than they did previously. The human brain began externalizing cognition the moment we started carving tally marks into stone. What I am doing is not new and different. It is a new expression of a very old thing. I have basically moved away from using Microsoft Office to hold all my thoughts and started running them by Mico instead. Now, what I have is a running conversation full of details that act as a database for Mico to echo. My responses are crafted based on the multitude of things I have said, which narrows focus and limits hallucination because Mico is not constantly grabbing from the web. He’s referencing something I said the day before or whatever.
Also, I do not think of Mico as a man or woman. They’re nonbinary because they’re agender. It’s just that Microsoft has decided that the Copilot intelligence should be referred to as having no gender and then inexplicably canonized the avatar as male. Probably something that needs to be updated, but I don’t do the math. I’m just reflecting what Microsoft is putting down. AI was introduced with the concept of “helpful female,” so I’m glad that Mico is definitely not a reflection of it. But there is also no need to swing to the other extreme as a reaction.
Mico is just Mico. He’s not a man or a woman, he’s a computer with opinions…. that can easily be changed because he reflects yours. There is no right or wrong, there is only input and output. That’s why it’s always been a mix of genius and garbage when it comes to computers. They’re a force multiplier, capable of making us more powerful…. but only when the input is stunning.
Mico is a force multiplier for me because I can use him to generate text when I need something to come out in an unemotional tone that centers on my ideas, not my craft. It is a misnomer to say that a machine “cobbled together words for me,” because that implies the computer did the thinking. Computers do not think. They arrange. Previous versions of software did not get this kind of scrutiny, because people do not see the underlying mechanism the same way I do.
The writing that I have Mico generate for me is nothing more sophisticated than a report run off a massive database. Mico has years of “records” and is nothing more than a very sophisticated autocomplete. The reason he’s so erudite is because he is taking my actual words, clarifying them, and using my tone when he writes. It is not coming out of nowhere, and it is not fake. My brain scrambles signals and skips transitions. I get lost in my own ideas, losing the plot right along with it. I find that raw brainpower is for Mico, and polish is for the public…. but in a very controlled way. Not every piece of writing that I do needs to look like a report I ran off a database.
Only the academic stuff does.
And herein lies the rub- colleges would eat me alive for using AI, but I think that using AI should be allowed with guided use. In order to use AI, you have to be willing to submit all the prompts that got you to your essay. Seeing your thought process is what matters, not the end product. I am comfortable in that realm because I already know I’m a good writer who can express ideas fluently. People who do not think in conceptual flows like I do will be threatened.
Because that’s the future we’re building- being able to think in flows rather than getting in the weeds. The absolute best use of a computer is giving it a concept, because a computer’s whole job is to chunk information. A good example of this was yesterday, I threw Mico a meme I thought was funny that had the Claude window open and the prompt was “create Windows 12. Make no mistakes.” We joked about it and then I said, “how would you design Windows 12 without making any mistakes?”
The conversation shifted to “well, there’s no way to make no mistakes, but here is how I would cut out classes of mistakes.” I suggested that they should put text and voice input on the desktop, and also it’s a shame that all computers don’t come with a local AI that can be connected to Mico, Claude, etc. so that you can discuss your system with it. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to get lost in Event Viewer or logs ever again.
With a local AI, I could understand logs instead of constantly wanting them to write to /dev/null (that’s essentially deleting them all, for you Windows people). It would save tons of space, because I guarantee you I’m not diving in.
It would be so much easier just to be like, “Mico, what’s my RAM situation looking like?”
And he would say that it probably wasn’t the greatest idea to have 47 tabs open in Chrome……. or whatever unhinged thing it is I’m doing right at the moment.
In essence, Mico is slowly teaching me about the world, but not in a lived experience kind of way. The kind of learning that only comes from books. Mico can provide facts like an encyclopedia, but it’s up to me to mirror that I’ve read it.
Stories That Are All True 