Connecting Dots Thread #4 - Having a conflict discussion that cause low blood sugar

Oct 30, 2024

I hadn’t considered that I would feel low blood sugar due to one conversation with my friend.

Yesterday morning, while reading a book after waking up, a vibration caught my attention. It was my friend sending several messages about the leftover topics from my new articles (which will be published around 11/01).

The topic revolves around the question: “Will advanced tools like AI search engines dilute human capability, or will it be the other way around?” It’s a challenging question. In my article, I tried to express that everything has its cost. The biggest cost of advanced tools like search engines and AI is that they give answers to humankind too quickly, eventually cultivating a tendency to want answers as fast as possible.

My friend, on the other hand, disagrees with this concern. He believes that we actually benefit from this fast speed since we can explore different directions more quickly and cheaply. Take the AI coding tool Cursor for example: even though a junior developer might heavily rely on the tool itself without thinking about the solutions it produces, in the long run, they can benefit by forming a better understanding of the codebase more quickly because they can try and fail at a faster pace.

My argument is that this kind of habit will foster dependency on what Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 thinking, which relies on intuition and is very fast. But to really cultivate original thinking and creativity, what we need is System 2 thinking.

The truth is, in this discussion, all we have are analogies; we don’t have concrete proof on either side. One of his arguments becomes very persuasive: “benefit of the doubt,” which usually means choosing to believe in someone’s honesty or innocence before judgment. In the context of this discussion, it means we choose to first affirm the possible benefits of the technology and then discuss the potential costs.

I don’t think I can easily reach a conclusion about this topic. It’s complex and has a long history of debate across generations. Even though I wrote an article arguing about the cost of these “fast” technologies, I still think they bring tremendous benefits to us. All we need to do is remain aware of the costs and stay conscious of their implications.

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