Atrophy
If you don't use it, you lose it. Phones took the numbers, maps took the routes, screens took the books. AI takes the decision. What's left?
Short answer
Handing off a task you stop practicing costs you the skill, which everyone accepts for muscle and few apply to thinking. Phone numbers, routes, and reading each went when something took the boring part, and the boring part was the exercise. AI takes the decision itself. Checking its work is the obvious answer for what's left, but spotting a bad decision takes judgment you built by making some. The question stays open.
Key takeaways
- —If you don't use it, you lose it. Everyone accepts that for muscle and almost no one applies it to thinking.
- —Each handoff came with the same defense, it only took the boring part. The boring part was the exercise.
- —Earlier handoffs took a task. AI takes the decision, the part you used to do with your own judgment.
- —Checking the machine's work needs the judgment the machine is replacing, because you learn what a bad decision looks like by making some.
The cast comes off after 6 weeks.
The arm underneath is thin. Pale. It doesn't match the other one.
Nothing was wrong with it. You just didn't use it.
If you don't use it, you lose it.
Everyone accepts that about muscle. Almost no one applies it to anything else.
So look at what you've already lost...
You used to know 10 phone numbers by heart. Now you know your own.
You used to know the way. Now you follow a voice.
You used to finish a book. Now you finish a headline.
Each one felt like a favor. And each one came with the same defense.
It only took the boring part.
But the boring part was the exercise.
Remembering the number was the rep. Finding the way was the rep. Nobody lifts a weight because the weight needs moving.
TV and screens took your time, and reading was one of the first things to go. Those took a task.
The next one is different...
This one takes the decision.
AI doesn't hand you a number or a route. It hands you the answer. What to write. What to buy. What to say. Which of the 3 to pick. It weighs the options so you don't have to.
That sounds like relief, until you ask what it costs.
So what's left?
The obvious answer is that you check its work. You stay the editor.
It sounds safe. It rests on something nobody has looked at yet...
What does an editor need?
You can catch a typo in a sentence you couldn't write. A bad decision is different. You know what one looks like because you made some. You paid for them, and that's how you learned.
The editor runs on the judgment the writer built. And the writer is the part that went first...
What's left for your brain to do?