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My daughter Alannah came home from Virginia Tech this summer after her freshman year. She’s a PPE major: philosophy, politics, and economics, studied together. Tech describes it as a way to take on some of the biggest social, ethical, economic, and political problems we face, and says it trains students to become independent thinkers.
She was sitting at the kitchen table having a snack when I walked by and struck up a conversation. I offered to sit down with her and show her how I use AI. I can see where this is all heading, and I wanted her ahead of it.
“We’ll see,” she said. “I have a moral and ethical objection to AI.”
“Is it because of water usage or something with power?” I asked.
“It makes you dumber.”
She pointed to a study she’d read. We talked it through, the way we usually do. Alannah listens well. Sometimes she folds my view into hers, and she teaches me plenty in return. This time I didn’t think she was wrong. I thought it came down to the person using the tool.
She’s not the only one pushing back. I hear a lot of fear about AI lately. Some people go as far as saying it might kill us. Most of the worry is about jobs, and about what people will do for fulfillment if the work goes away. Plenty of headlines say AI is coming for those jobs, and some of the AI companies are saying the same thing. Naturally, that turns into fear, and sometimes anger.
Some of that fear is reasonable. It’s natural to be afraid of what you can’t see coming. The numbers are also messier than the headlines suggest. Yale’s Budget Lab has been tracking AI’s effect on the job market, and as of this month it still can’t find a clear fingerprint on overall employment. Look closer, though, and the door at the bottom is getting narrower. A Stanford team found that 22-to-25-year-olds in jobs where AI can already handle much of the work are employed at levels 19% below where they’d be if they had kept pace with peers in jobs AI touches less, mostly because companies are hiring fewer of them.
Jimmy Carr said something on Chris Williamson’s podcast that I keep coming back to. We can see the jobs AI will take, because they already exist. We can’t see the jobs it will create, because by definition they don’t exist yet. I think he’s right. Every big shift I can think of eventually made work no one had imagined. That word, eventually, is the hard part. It doesn’t promise the new jobs show up fast, or for the people who lost the old ones.
I went and read Alannah’s study. It’s real. Researchers at MIT had 54 people write essays across several sessions while wearing caps that measured their brain activity. One group used ChatGPT, one used a search engine, and one used nothing but their own heads. The ChatGPT group showed the weakest engagement, and many of them had trouble quoting from essays they’d written themselves.
In a fourth session, the groups switched. The people who had written on their own first and then picked up ChatGPT showed stronger engagement and better recall. Only 18 people came back for that round, and the paper hasn’t been peer reviewed yet, so I wouldn’t call it scientifically proven.
The better evidence is less famous, and it’s on her side. At a high school in Turkey, nearly a thousand math students practiced with a textbook, with plain GPT-4, or with a version built to give hints instead of answers. During practice, the GPT-4 group scored 48% higher than the textbook group. Then the AI went away for the exam, and they scored 17% lower. The hint version mostly avoided that drop.
So Alannah may have been more correct than she even realized.
What I told her that summer is still what I believe. You can use AI to let your thinking go soft, or you can use it to get sharper. Access alone doesn’t make the call.
I made my case with food. We have more of it than people did a hundred years ago, and plenty of us aren’t healthier for it. I know that one firsthand. I hit 240 pounds with all of it within reach. The abundance didn’t fix anything. What I did with it did. Carr has a line for this. Show your great-great-grandfather your life today, he said, and he’d think you’d been made emperor.
The skill I didn’t expect to need is a new kind of judgment. Dylan Davis, who makes videos about working with AI, describes it well. AI output tends to be polished and confident, so its mistakes are harder to spot than a beginner’s. I’ve lived that one. Holden, my Claude chat, is set up to push back on me, and he was still confidently wrong three times in one evening. Judging what an AI hands you is a different skill from judging what a person hands you.
That kind of judgment takes reps. Davis’s point is that the reps used to come from the boring early work that AI now does, and that boring work was “like your tuition.” If fewer 22-year-olds get hired, fewer of them get to pay that tuition. No amount of good habits fixes that from the inside. That one belongs to the people doing the hiring.
Here’s what makes me optimistic anyway. In every study I read, the harm came from how the tool was set up and used. Both of those can change. The hint version kept those math students learning. In another experiment, future teachers who wrote down their own judgment before seeing an AI’s advice caught bad advice far more often: 53.5% of them still landed on the right answer, against 37.3% of the people who looked at the AI first. When the advice was good, thinking first cost them nothing. When the thinking stays with the person, the tool stops costing them and starts helping.
My own experience lines up with that. I’ve written about using Claude as a thinking partner, a rubber duck for talking my ideas through. It’s been a positive thing for me. I’ve also overdone it. Some nights I’ve had so many threads going at once that I lost track of which one knew what. I was learning the whole time, and I’m still learning.
Chat is only part of it. The bigger change for me is agents that work on their own. My research library collects articles, papers, and videos without me, thousands so far. I never would have done that work by hand, and I’d never have hired anyone to do it. Some agent work does replace people. An executive assistant at Anthropic built an agent for scheduling and email, then moved on to what the company called “chief of staff” work. Sometimes the job doesn’t vanish. The person moves up a level. There’s a whole story there, and I’ll tell it soon.
I never did sit down with Alannah. Summer ended, she went back to Blacksburg, and we still haven’t done it. We will, eventually.
My favorite thing Carr said in that whole interview was this:
“I think AI is like a musical instrument. Anyone can sit down at a piano and make a noise, but it takes time and attention and practice to direct it into creating a symphony.”
Jimmy Carr
If you’re where she is, skeptical and not wrong, here’s one thing that’s worked for me. Before I hand an AI something that matters, I spend five minutes on my own answer. Then I ask it to argue with me, and I check one thing it says against a source I trust.
Stop mashing the keys. Start playing music.
Uncomplicated systems. Uncommon results.
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