Knowledge Displacement

“I talked to a person a week ago who was let go because of their job, because of AI, only to be rehired because they found out that they were wrong to let the people go because they found out AI couldn't do all the things.”

“Whether or not leadership understands that I don't know. So I suspect what's going to happen is there's going to be a dramatic overreaction to the introduction of AI. It's going to make a lot of changes to organizations that probably shouldn't occur. And at some point, we'll probably have a massive overcorrection.”

“And that is the result of social media. I very firmly believe that it hasn't necessarily been a good thing for them. So what happens when we lose our ability to sit and gnaw on a problem or think creatively about something or think outside the box? What happens when we're only going to the AI for the solution? What does it do to human ingenuity? And that's a big concern of mine.”

“But I also worry that with some of the streamlining that it does, does anybody need to really know how to do calculus anymore? You can make the AI do it. These are critical skills, though, and they're skills we should have. We should be able to do algebra. It's a pain. Use the AI if you've got it. But I know a lot of teachers who are expressing frustration because their kids aren't learning some of these foundational things that they need to know.”

“the biggest fear is the reverse of the coin that I was mentioning before: people stop thinking. Stop critical thinking. That's a huge risk at the population level, because then we would be unable to do anything, like understanding our lives, making decisions, electing our politicians and whatnot. So that's really a risk that I see, because this is really tapping into our innate laziness”

“I remember distinctly my grandmother telling me, "Well, this is true because I've heard it on the radio." And then my parents saying, "No, this is true because I've heard it on TV." Then, "This is true because I read it on the internet." And [this is] true, because AI told me. So unfortunately I think this is just massive and pervasive in ways that we don't really grasp as of now.”

“now everything is at the tip of your fingers, but I don't think you're valuing it as much because it's effortless, and you don't question it as much as we did in the past.”

“I worry about schools. One of the things I really want to, where I want to move my consultancy, is into public schools because they are clueless. Teachers are free to do whatever they want with it. I think there needs to be governance specific to teachers, governance specific to admins, and more importantly special ed students versus typical students. I have a [REDACTED: family member]. An AI tutor probably would have made the last six years of his life a lot less hellish. So I worry about schools implementing it incorrectly and doing like a one-size-fits-all, which is not how it should be.”

“For myself, no. For others, yes. For myself, no. Because of the sheer volume of what I'm able to do now. And at my core, I'm a conversation designer and that is so deeply ingrained in me that even if I got a little rusty, it wouldn't take me long to get right back on the path. But for kids and teachers really freak me out. Like you know, the studies, as soon as kids' competency, everything, everything tanked as soon as Chromebooks entered the picture. And now we want to talk about kids using AI.”

“But again, on the detraction side, I kind of worry like how much of myself am I losing through this process because I'm just lazily relying on it now to provide me with all of the perspective. So yeah, that kind of concerns me.”

“And when [his son] hits the job market, is he suddenly going to find that if he, for whatever reason, ChatGPT falls out of vogue, it becomes illegal, something unforeseeable happens. Does he, when you kick that crutch out from underneath him, is he capable of doing anything? Is anyone capable of doing anything? And I've seen some articles about this idea of just the stagnation of human capabilities. The more we lean on something that can do something so comprehensive for us, or at least that we believe to be so comprehensive for us. So that gives me concern for the future. I don't know what to tell either one of my kids about what's an AI-proof, if there even is such a thing. What's an AI-proof field of study for you, field of work for you? Or how should you again responsibly integrate it into your work in a way that's not eroding your own ability to think critically and put two and two together.”

“Sometimes in my doctorate I worry about losing the ability to just find stuff in the library search engine. And I even went so far as to hire a tutor because I'm in my dissertation phase and I'm like, how do you know what words to search and what's going to bring you back the right research? And they're like, well, it's a process, a learning process that I feel like I'm missing out on. Like when I started design school we started with paper and pencil.”

“Like relearned design from a very non-technical standpoint and I feel like I'm losing out on that process if I just rely on AI to find the stuff for me. So I guess, but I guess maybe that's going to be a skill that's obsolete because I don't know the Dewey Decimal system.”

“Well, I kind of think of, I don't know that I have many concerns because when we, my only concern is that we don't start with the basics in school and that we give AI too soon. So I'm talking about elementary years, primary years. Because I'm thinking back to when I learned long division and multiplication and the basics of math, it was like learning a language without knowing you're learning a language.”

“There's a logic behind it. And I feel like if we skip over learning [the basics of math, long division and multiplication], maybe we'll have people who can't think for themselves. But we're starting to see that now with students coming up because they're over-tested, just because of over-testing. So I feel like, you know, we used to farm and we used to be really active and walk and now we just go to the gym. So those who have the motivation to hone their creative thinking or critical thinking skills, they will. Those who don't want to won't. And that's where the divide will be, I think.”

“Okay. So an ongoing chat I have in Gemini, I saw past tense being used in a conversation. So I asked at the current time which was off, which was really sort of shocking to me, and it's obviously not a constant, you'd think maybe a computer would be. So I had to ask it to going forward always refer to the atomic clock. So occasionally I'll ask what time it is and sometimes it'll also tell me what time it is when I answer for a new part of the chat. But I think critical thinking is so so important because I will notice in this ongoing chat things that are left out, I will question and they'll act like they forgot. I don't know where that disconnect is, but I would say if you're not really critically thinking about the information you're getting, it's going to probably let you down in some ways.”

“They do. I think one thing that I noticed is the older you get, the more skeptical you are. I noticed that the younger generation, and again not being judgmental, but I was working with the millennials, the new alpha, and those generations, I cannot keep track of which, whatever name they are now, but they're like, "Oh, AI said so, it's the right way." And you check the older people, they had more experience, like, "No, might be a better way to do that." So I noticed that I would say 30s, mid-30s and older, they had more critical thinking, a little more common sense. The younger, like the early career, like the late teens, early 20s, they're more into, "No, no, no, let's do this. Let's trust AI and that's it." So, as a whole, I see the biggest thing with the age group.”

“Some are front end, sort of like a dashboard kind of analysis view. And if we come to a new client or a use case that doesn't fit within that schema of building blocks, we sort of have to take a step back and reconsider. Do we need a new one or does it fit? Do we have to broaden the definition of one of them? And definitely a couple people are using AI to try and figure that part of it out. So propose a new building block that fits within our system. I think sometimes I am seeing the result of that work with AI a few steps down the chain and I have to question whether that was a good idea. So maybe the AI proposed a new structure to how our product works and I disagree with it because it doesn't take into the context of whether an end user will be able to make sense of it.”

“And what do you lose with that? Well, we take for granted our ability to think about software the way we think about it. And I have to think that education has to change because they can't be producing software coders anymore. That's not the skill that's valuable. They need to be thinking higher level. I think that's going to be the next shift. The growing pain of, oh well, this field that has existed for the last 50 years, more than that, I don't know, software has been around longer than I've been alive, so 60 years let's say. It's been more or less the same. Yes, the capability of the computers has improved, the languages have changed, but the principles really haven't. The development methodologies have evolved.”

“They need to be able to learn what are ways to still work without AI, but how do we use it to make the world better?”

“Sorry, I think I'm, like, all over the board. So, I feel like there's an idea, there's an innovation piece to it. It can both fuel or hinder innovation. I think there's a security piece to it, where they still need to understand what you do and don't give to the internet. But then there's also, like, finding a job. Finding a job with AI tools right now is, like, insane. I have friends that are looking for work, and I have friends that, like, being on LinkedIn and figuring out, what's a real posting and what's not? How do you make your resume stand out with all of these tools? How do you know if somebody has two jobs? How do you know if someone, my husband does a lot of interviews, learning how to interview without somebody giving you the answer, you know? It's just learning, like, they don't know anything else and that's the problem. They need to be able to learn what are ways to still work without AI, but how do we use it to make the world better?”

“People whose jobs were built upon being a storehouse and guardian of knowledge, they got destroyed, like, when you talk about a travel agent and things like that. Because people didn't have access to the information, and the travel agent had the ability to piece together, hold and guard, that information, and then piece that information together for you. In some ways, that's some of what our job is, when we talk about UX, or when we talk about design. We have an embedded expertise about certain things.”

“At the end of the day, my biggest concern, my biggest fear, is, when you build a very complex interface, is that you completely miss edge cases, right? And not, like, extreme edge cases, but just non-obvious use cases. That causes a really big problem in the interface. It's not necessarily a bug, but a certain way of a person using the interface is not going to be supported, or a certain path, whether they take, do, they're going to dead-end, or they're going to lose their data. They're going to do all these different things. That is really one of my concerns about how this thing is, when you start to, when you have a product manager who thinks, "I don't need designers, I don't even need engineers. I'm just going to spec it all out and feed it in here, and then I'm going to look at it not with the critical eye that really is necessary, but just from a product manager perspective, and like, it works, and then push it to production." And then it turns out it doesn't work because there was no critical expertise in terms of understanding exactly how things work, or what that process should look like.”

“So my concern is that, whether it's true or not, the perception of customers or clients would be that all that just exists in the LLM already. So, "I don't need your personal expertise about it." I don't know where that's going to shake out, I honestly don't. So that is a concern that makes me, as a 50-something-year-old guy who's been working in technology, like, is that going to be obliterated? On the other side of it, having worked through some prototypes and things like that, I definitely do see the advantages of speed of execution. As someone whose role is primarily a strategist, I can actually see advantages to me, because I think about it in terms of inputs and research, and putting it all together, and then I do a certain level of design, and then I pass it off to someone else.”

“So that's what I will say the university gave me. Out of everything, that is what undergraduate gave to me: the ability to critically think and question, even if it was cycles my family goes through or just the world around me in my working day. It gives you the ability to critically think. But if we integrate so much AI and our critical thinking skills are leaned on, like, okay, I asked this question, let me just go check with whatever chatbot. I wonder, when does that critical thinking get diminished?”