If AI is the answer, what was the question?

Playing around with AI, I still feel myself being rocked around between excitement and the uneasy feeling of something being fundamentally wrong, like looking into a computer-generated face that edges along the uncanny valley. Like I can't quite put my finger on it, but I know it's there.

I recently read someone quoting a person on the internet that "reading books doesn't make sense anymore because we have AI to summarize and explain everything to us". The answer struck me. "Books are not just information transfer, a book changes who we are, it is a transformative experience".

Anyone who loves books will have experienced this. Books are magical. There is something to the medium, that fosters a sense of exploration of ones own mind, at our own pace, giving it enough time to truly grasp the meaning of difficult ideas.

Video by contrast just drags us along, no matter if we understood anything or not - and through that external pacing often gives us the illusion of progress, of transformation, when it's anything but. The idea tries to hold on to something and then gets flushed out of our system shortly after.

How many transformative movies have you seen? They sure are there. But when asked about wether they liked a movie that's based on a book, many people will say "the book was better". I think it's because the book transformed them, when the movie tried hard but couldn't.

Experiencing things at our own pace, taking them in, turning them around, moving on only when it feels right, that is a transformative journey.

Which leads us back to AI. It sure makes us more productive by providing a short-cut to tedious work and reflection and it does so in impressive ways. But the cognitive journey of arriving at a solution cannot be substituted by being given the solution itself.

The question is just as important as the answer and before we ask the right question we'll not arrive at the right answer. But the right question comes usually at the end of a series of wrong questions. Those are our journey.

And it's asking those questions first that we truly understand the last one and ultimately the solution itself.

I wonder if Douglas Adams smiles down upon us sometimes, wanting to remind us that even though we have a machine today that gives us our answers, we might slowly be forgetting to ask the right questions.