AI Can Give Us the Answer. It Can’t Give Us the Journey.
We’re approaching a world where human knowledge is available almost instantly. But knowledge and judgment were never the same thing.We have spent centuries trying to shorten the distance between a question and an answer.Libraries organized knowledge. Universities taught us how to navigate it.…
We’re approaching a world where human knowledge is available almost instantly. But knowledge and judgment were never the same thing.We have spent centuries trying to shorten the distance between a question and an answer.Libraries organized knowledge. Universities taught us how to navigate it. Search engines made much of it accessible from anywhere. Artificial intelligence may reduce that distance almost to zero.Ask a complicated question today, and an AI system can search, synthesize, explain, and reason across information that might once have taken hours, days or even years of specialized study to understand.I think this will be enormously empowering, but I’ve started wondering about something else.What was happening to us during all that time we spent looking for the answer?I’ve spent more than twenty-five years designing and building technology. I’ve built products that worked, products that didn’t, and products I was convinced people would understand only to discover that they didn’t.Over time, I’ve realized that experience gave me something other than additional knowledge. It changed what I noticed.I remember the Magic Eye posters that became popular in the 1990s. At first they looked like fields of repeating colors and patterns. Somewhere inside, however, was a three-dimensional image.Some people saw it immediately. Others stared for minutes before the image suddenly appeared. Some never saw it.Nothing about the poster changed. Every pixel had been there from the beginning.The pixels didn’t change. The observer did.I suspect expertise works in much the same way. A physician doesn’t become experienced simply by knowing more medicine. An investor doesn’t develop judgment simply by reading more financial statements. And a designer doesn’t learn how people actually behave by studying more principles of design.They practice. They make mistakes. They encounter exceptions. They watch theories fail when confronted with reality. Eventually, experience changes what they are capable of seeing. And that raises an interesting problem for the AI age.For the first time, we are approaching a world where enormous amounts of accumulated human knowledge can be accessed without necessarily making the journey that historically accompanied acquiring it.AI can explain what an experienced architect knows. That doesn’t mean I see a building the way an architect sees it.It can explain what an experienced investor looks for in a company. That doesn’t give me the accumulated context of watching hundreds of companies succeed and fail.It can give someone access to decades of knowledge about product design. That doesn’t give them decades of watching actual people use the things they’ve designed.This isn’t an argument for making knowledge difficult to acquire. There is nothing noble about spending three days finding information that a machine can surface in thirty seconds.But I think there is a distinction here worth protecting. Access to knowledge is not the same as developing the judgment to use it.We learned while we searched. We encountered contradictions. We followed paths that went nowhere. We made mistakes, changed our minds, and sometimes discovered things we weren’t looking for.The answer was valuable, but so was what happened to us while we were trying to find it.That’s why I keep returning to one thought:We have spent centuries trying to shorten the distance between a question and an answer. AI may reduce it almost to zero. But that distance was never empty. That distance contained the journey, and the journey helped create judgment.Perhaps this becomes one of the great paradoxes of artificial intelligence. AI may make knowledge more abundant than it has ever been. If it does, knowing more may become less differentiating.What matters may increasingly be what we notice. Which questions we choose to ask. Which patterns deserve another look. When experience tells us something doesn’t quite fit.Expertise isn’t simply what you know. It is what experience has taught you to see. AI can dramatically accelerate our access to knowledge. We should make sure we don’t mistake that for accelerating our way to understanding. Because sometimes having every pixel still isn’t enough to see the picture.This piece develops an idea from my ongoing essay series exploring technology, AI and the human systems changing around them. The original essay, “You Have to Look Longer,” is published at JasonInasi.com.About Jason InasiJason Inasi is a technology entrepreneur, Founder and CEO of DigitalDNA Labs, and Founder and Chief Product Officer of ReadableIQ. For more than 25 years, he has built digital platforms at the intersection of technology, marketing, and artificial intelligence.Throughout his career, Jason has developed products and digital strategies for Fortune 500 companies, healthcare organizations, universities, media companies, and global brands. Today, his work is focused on building the infrastructure for digital trust in the age of artificial intelligence. Through ReadableIQ, he is developing the technologies that help organizations become discoverable, understandable, trusted, and recommendable by AI systems.This story is published on Generative AI. Connect with us on LinkedIn and follow Zeniteq to stay in the loop with the latest AI stories.Subscribe to our newsletter and YouTube channel to stay updated with the latest news and updates on generative AI. Let’s shape the future of AI together!AI Can Give Us the Answer. It Can’t Give Us the Journey. was originally published in Generative AI on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.Source: Generative AI Pub — Published — Category: Image AI