Balance AI With Mind Training
Dear Zettlers,
There is immense tension between AI’s advances in capabilities and its negative effects on our minds. In the last newsletter, I called claims that you don’t have to remember anything a scam.
Time proved me right. The canary in the coal mine, software engineering, starts to see changes. It seems that junior positions are being scrapped, as senior engineers are now overseeing AI agents rather than people. One pressing question now is how to develop the skills to become a senior engineer without first being a junior engineer.
Let me juxtapose the AI problem of our education system. Just search TikTok for the phrase “graduation thanks to ChatGPT,” and you’ll see a lot of videos. Degrees are devalued as students increasingly delegate writing papers to AI. I framed the software engineering issue as an access problem for career-making. The AI problem in our education system is also a career problem. But the problem is inverted. If AI is now doing the work, a degree is no longer a testimony to knowledge, skill, or work ethic.
The commonality between both problems is that minds are no longer trained. AI is making us dumber – if we allow it.
In health and fitness, the problem of missing stimulus is already solved. As more and more people’s lives didn’t force them to move at all, the concept of training was invented. As hunter-gatherers, just existing in the world and taking care of basic needs was enough movement to keep us healthy. If you commute in a car or worse, work from home, you have to artificially reintroduce movement via training. So, instead of walking home from a hunt, you walk on a treadmill, and instead of throwing a spear, you do some kettlebell snatches.
At the same time, health nuts are very aware that being healthy doesn’t just mean adding elements like training to your day. It is also about removing toxic influences like junk food and stimulating content, like political content, before sleeping.
I, myself, look forward to AI’s improvement because I have a Zettelkasten and use it as a thinking environment. That means that I regularly include time blocks in my calendar to push my mind to its limits. So, effort is not an issue, though I feel a slight temptation to just engage with AI, because it feels much easier to chat with it than to torture my mind by endlessly editing a note to get the idea right. When I work with my Zettelkasten, I don’t merely capture what I think the idea is with minimal effort. I let the notes be the external manifestation of my thinking and tinkering with the ideas. Working in this manner resembles how software engineers work with code. This makes my Zettelkasten a gym for my mind. Note-taking, writing, and deep thinking align and merge into a single act, serving multiple purposes at once.
It is not the case that anything straining the mind is proper mind training. You can’t properly train your cardiovascular endurance with weight training. You can’t preserve your muscle mass into the last quarter of your life with just light exercise. The same is true for mind training.
Live long and prosper
Sascha