I’m not sure if it’s somehow my upbringing, bubble or just a strange though, but I think we are missing the point of learning and that is how it changes us. It’s a change to our worldview, it’s a change to our habits, it’s a change to our self-confidence that we’ve managed to learn something new. It’s physical change to our brain and body.
Retrospectively, thinking about my five years at university is that the large part of the those five years is learning how to learn. Learning when to change a course, when to try to push trough and when to take an easier path. Finding what I enjoyed and take courses which were interesting although harder. There were two cases when I almost failed at the university and one of them was an English course! And look at me know, living in the UK and writing in English. It has been decades of learning. From learning grammar to drunkenly shouting over each other in a pub.
Now with LLMs/AI it is easiest than before to get trough tests, school or knowledge tasks.
I bet teachers know this and are aware of this, but outside of that space, I don’t think we are taking that into consideration.
The AI discourse focuses on completion of tasks. There is a green tick box at the end and that’s it. Customer service and a closed ticket. Sales presentation prepared. Product description or privacy policy written.
Outsourcing thinking is the same as organisations that outsource key capabilities to 3rd parties and consulting companies to learn later on that they are further behind than they ever were and the climb is just much steeper. It was the consulting company that learned the most rather than the organisation or people in there. The next project or change will just be more painful. Same as going for a run for the first time in years.
And I find myself in an odd space where LLMs are amazing for learning. As an example, I’m not private equity fund accountant. If you want to learn it to a level you need as a technologist, it can meet you right where you are. Instead of trying to learn from a thousand page accounting book written for accountants.
But there is a thin line between using it to learn and me asking “how will AI change private equity fund tech and operations” to copy paste it to a post.
I’m intentionally using private equity fund accounting as one of the more obscure things. You won’t meet people in life who would even heard about it, but now anyone can learn to understand it at their own pace, from their own starting point.
It’s great to be able to rebrand and modify your sales presentation to specific customer within few minutes, but if you are pitching to SMB owner, spending few hours of learning will get you much further at the next conversation. I believe that we trust more people that truly understand our problems. One of the proofs we will see is that we won’t see consulting companies saying “yes, this big sales presentation is AI generated and I’m just reading it confidently”, but it will be positions as “we use AI to find the best solution for you”, but the Junior analyst putting it together might have just ticked a box to send a pptx over.
It’s great to use a forklift if you want to get 50kg cement bag on a top shelf, especially if you have 100 of those bags. You learned how to drive a forklift and how to move cement bags around a warehouse. Brilliant, win, win.
But you might also want to be able to do it yourself, because you want to be able to take the kitchen robot from the top shelf at your home without it smashing your face. If we don’t practice and exercise. One day you might not be able to get into the hypothetical forklift or sit there for an hour.
And if we think that it’s pointless to be able to pick up 50kg bag because we have forklifts, we might miss on all the other things that ability to pick that up gives us.
Habit to exercise, skill to pick other things up, learning how to engage our muscles. Keeping your body from deteriorating and having ability to pick your grandchild in the older age. Being able to start playing padel with your friend or to go for a hike.
I have a thing about analogies from a physical world as I think they can show how unnecessary complicated we make the abstract learning and knowledge work. It’s not that much different.
Learning keeps our options opened. Use it or lose it as the old adage goes.
And I think, since we are wired to take the easier way, we might lean too much into LLMs in our lives in a way that it outsources our thinking rather than it would help us learn, change our mind and keep our thinking sharp.
Just above average 