About staying relevant alongside AI
Inspired by enduring craft and service to others, this is a reflection on staying useful as AI accelerates.
Iβll write Alan Rickman-style, releasing these words into the wild.
βCheers to eight years with Grammarly.β
When this landed in my inbox, I did a double take.
It reminded me that a younger version of myself took a risk, stuck with writing, and was lucky enough to make a living from it for a while. I wrote about it here.
But recently, as AI accelerates production, I have been wondering what it means to remain helpful.
Machines can now produce in minutes what took a human decades to learn and build. And everyone can write today.
The answer somehow came to me after two weekends at Esplanade, watching masters of their craft.
Why do we still listen to classical music, dance, play chess or run races when machines can outperform us?
I think mastery is precious precisely because a human life is finite.
A lifetime is long enough to devote yourself to something and achieve something meaningful.
Yet it can be short and imperfect enough that mastery may always remain just out of reach. (Wrote some thoughts here)
To collectively refine a craft and sustain its community is to preserve its foundations and pass it on to the next generation. Through that continuity of lifetimes, the essential principles of the craft then endure. (No pliΓ© or tendu ever goes unrewarded!)
Taking my cues from classical art forms, I think remaining cognitively helpful alongside AI for the rest of my life means continuing to:
- Understand problems deeply
- Question assumptions and practise first-principles thinking
- Find the seed of insight that can serve others
What is first-principles thinking, anyway?
First-principles thinking means breaking a problem down to its most basic truths, then building a path forward from those truths.
Rather than relying automatically on habit, analogy or assumptions, this method helps us critically examine whether existing ways of thinking still fit the current situation.
For example, instead of asking, βHow do I stay relevant as a writer when AI writes faster?β, we could ask:
- What is writing actually for?
- What value does a reader need?
- Which parts require judgement, context, taste or responsibility?
