Of all of the discussions currently happening around AI, there's one that I've rarely seen talked about directly, and it's the one that might concern me the most:
What happens to a person when a tool robs them of the necessary struggle required to learn and become an expert in their craft ?
For those who've built up years or decades of experience, all of the questions around AI, where, how, and why, are being guided by many hard-won lessons. Learning to recognize cues that help distill something complex into something valuable. Learning what doesn't work from failure. Learning details that guide why certain things are used to solve specific problems.
But what of those who are just entering the field? The ones who have yet to develop a professional opinion and are looking to everyone else for guidance?
Asking new folks to incorporate AI into their work creates a situation where they are being asked to deliberately side-step the most important part of learning how to do something well. The friction. And in tandem with recent research on what AI is good for, and findings on how it affects us as humans (in certain situations), I have a profound worry that the more the professional world tries to feverishly incorporate AI for more and more productivity gains, that humans will become more and more subservient to this technology to even function.
Perhaps I'm worrying too much. It's always been true that some skills become less necessary over time. For instance, musicians can now easily reach for a particular kind of reverb rather than being asked to build their own models. But product designers have also moved away from the material reality of their work over time (for many reasons), and this has had a profoundly negative impact on accessibility.
I don't know if I have any solutions here. But I do know that robbing people of the necessary friction inherent to learning is dangerous. And if we're not thoughtful in our discourse and in our own practice, we risk creating a future where "impostor syndrome" won't just be a figment of the imagination.