Asleep at the wheel: A.I and critical thinking.

In the past few weeks A.I has become more prevalent in my life than ever before and I’m really not down for that.

I started this blog about a year ago, my idea was to challenge myself into speaking about subjects in photography and building a narrative for my work and the reasons why I’m so passionate about it. It was also a way to get out my comfort zone, the one big rule was that no A.I would ever be involved.

For those who don’t know I am dyslexic and reading and writing have never been on top of my agenda. I struggled in school in a time where the support was lacking, I was only diagnosed when I got to collage and then furthermore in university. Once I understood why I had struggled to pay attention to classes or keep my head in textbooks my life completely changed, I no longer felt like I was “thick” and that with different ways of learning I could achieve anything… within reason, you don’t want me doing the maths that gets people to the moon and back.

Predictive text changed the game for me, allowing me to actually express the words I wanted to get down on the page. Sometimes I still struggle and make mistakes, god knows how many mistakes I make grammatically in these blogs but here we are. Mistakes are human, my writing is categorically me and hopefully it builds more of a connection to you, the reader.

The biggest compliments I’ve been paid is people saying “I love your writing style” that means the world to me. In the early days I used to send my writing to a friend who is native to France but is a English teacher, they would fix little bits of my work but often would explain why some of my mistakes work, how they add pace and a rhythm to the words. It was great to get that feedback from a real person who had taken the time to understand the piece.

A.I is kinda like the crutch I found in predictive text except it takes the biggest human element out of the process which is critical thought and taking the time to fully comprehend and develop your own ideas.

I guess it must feel kinda great to have an idea add it into a prompt and see your thirty second thought brought into something tangible that you now can share and see these views as your own, but is it correct?

Though as many of us know A.I isn’t always telling the truth. It’s been known to have made up scenarios and even in law courts has made up citations or completely fabricated passages. A.I is still dependent on us using our own critical thinking and judgment.

Fabrizio Dell’Aqua a researcher at Harvard Business School wrote a study called Falling asleep at the wheel, using professional recruiters looking over resumes in three groups.

One group using a “perfect” A.I, a second group using an imperfect version of A.I where they were told it might make mistakes and a third group using no A.I at all. The group that did the best was the second group as they used judgment and critical thinking to get the best out of human and machine. It’s this, the symbiotic relationship that we need to be striving for in the future. A.I will get more powerful and present in our lives but how we choose to use it is key.

As we watch in real time governments and business hand more and more off to A.I, journalists are being laid off in favour of quick clickbait headlines to satisfy advertisers, is this really what we want for our futures? Less human interaction in art, culture, work, writing? What makes us special is our abilities to think different and see the world in unique ways. Yeah I won’t get you to the moon but I can make a good picture of it.

A big question is, can we all really look at our own jobs and know that they are safe from A.I and automation? There was always a thought that you could always fall back being a taxi driver but even they are driving themselves nowadays.

We should be heeding this warning that it is not a perfect system and if we don’t keep an eye on these systems and keep our own minds working we could all be falling asleep at the wheel.