Lazy Brain

I was having a discussion with my wife about the use of AI in higher education, and she suggested that students are using AI to do the homework in my finance class.

“But the homework has to be handwritten,” I said.

Yes, she said, and the students are typing in the question into AI, getting the answer, and writing it down.

“But isn’t that actually more work than just doing the problem?”

Yes, she said, and that is what the students are doing.

Thoughts. People don’t like to think, because thinking requires effort. You know what I am sick of? I am sick of these jerks telling me I am lazy because I don’t go to the gym, when in fact, they are the ones who are lazy because they refuse to use their brains. Yes, lifting weights is painful. The pain of lifting weights is trivial to the pain required to write an 800-word essay. Physical pain is nothing. About half a million people will finish a marathon in any given year. I have run a marathon. Yes, it was hard, and I was proud of myself for having done it, but it doesn’t crack the list of my top 10 accomplishments. Maybe not even the top fifty. My top 10 accomplishments are comprised of instances where I used my brain. My whole livelihood is dependent on my brain. This giant house that I am sitting in is a result of using my brain. Some Facebook friend will run a 5K in 29 minutes and take a photo of the participation medal, the happiest day of their lives. I don’t get it. The point here is that people would rather endure physical pain than mental pain, which is logical, when you understand that mental pain is tougher.

I’m not saying that I don’t use AI, because I do, but mostly as a more efficient form of search. For example, I looked up the number of marathon finishers on AI. It was a lot easier than googling it and picking through all the search results. Someone told me recently that you can build a pretty sophisticated website on Claude. That sounds interesting to me: there are few things I like less than monkeying with my websites on Wix or Squarespace. There are legitimate uses for AI, for sure, but what I don’t want to use it for is as a substitute for thinking. Computers are better at looking stuff up and writing code. Well, isn’t writing code thinking? Shouldn’t we be writing the code ourselves, instead of outsourcing it to AI? Why shouldn’t writing get the same treatment? Why are we making students write 800-word essays, when realistically, this is something they may never have to do in the future? You probably know where I come down on this. There is no art to writing code; you just want it to work, where there is an art to writing, and the computers aren’t very good at writing artistically. I gave ChatGPT the premise to one of my short stories in NIGHT MOVES, and asked it to write the story, and it was comically awful. I am comfortable saying that the computers are never going to get there. As a thought experiment, I could ask Perplexity to write this very essay in the style of Jared Dillian, and I suspect we would all have a good laugh.

That is the attraction of AI—we will never have to think again. Well, imagine if you could take a pill or an injection that would make you look like Clavicular, with no effort required. Would you do it? I would do it. Also an interesting thought experiment, but modern medicine is not to that point yet. Maybe it will be, someday. Correspondingly, what if you could use AI to write like John Updike (or Jared Dillian)? Would you do it? You probably would, but the technology isn’t there yet, and I doubt it ever will be. What I am talking about here is the concept of a shortcut—it used to be that you had to diet and exercise to lose weight. Now, you just have to take a pill. Jelly Roll looks like he has been taking the pill. Is this an indictment of Mr. Roll, that he took a shortcut, instead of putting in the hard work of dieting and exercise? Is his accomplishment less meaningful, because he took this shortcut? In my view, it is not—what matters is the result. Because he took the pill, he will have a longer and happier life, and the time he would have spent in the gym, he can instead spend on music, and he is better at music than lifting weights, so he should spend more time on music. We should all use time-saving inventions, instead of banging our heads against the wall.

Is AI somehow different? I think it is—what makes us human is our capacity to think and reason. From the Greek philosophers, to Locke and Hume and everyone in between, what has separated us from the plants and animals is our capacity to think, in search of truth. Who knows—maybe twenty years from now, higher education will consist of learning to write the best AI prompts, rather than doing the actual writing. That would be something. Let’s think about this: there is the industrial and the artisanal. You can buy mass-produced jewelry for x, or you can buy hand-made jewelry for 3x. The hand-made jewelry is more valuable because it is made by hand. Much to the dismay of the libertarians, the is the labor theory of value in action. I’ll also add that the hand-made artisanal jewelry is worse than the industrial jewelry. The industrial jewelry is perfect, while the artisanal jewelry has imperfections, but strangely, the imperfections make it more valuable. Maybe that is where writing will be twenty years from now—we will have industrial books and artisanal books, written by actual human beings, and we will pay more for the artisanal books than the industrial books. This pretty much encapsulates all of technological progress.

Still I don’t want to see the day where nobody has to think. The brain is a muscle, and the more you use it, the stronger it gets. If you’ve ever met someone who has never had to use their brain, you have probably found that it is difficult to carry on a conversation with them. People at the highest levels of government and business have to do a lot of thinking. Imagine if you were thrust into that position, and you had never done any real thinking in your entire life, having AI-ed all your assignments. Imagine going to see a doctor who had AI-ed all his assignments. Imagine seeing a lawyer who was using AI to write all his demand letters. Actually, we are there already. What value is the lawyer adding? Anyone can write a demand letter on AI. The value is in the letterhead, signifying that this person is licensed by virtue of having passed the bar exam. My guess is that sometime soon, you will start to see the pass rates for the bar exam (and the CFA exam, and others) start going down because people have lost the capacity to think. Ten years ago, people were sardonically telling laid-off journalists to learn to code. That was profoundly bad advice.

I don’t want to get into the economic effects of AI, because this is a newsletter about ethics and principles, and not economics. Do something for me right now: count backwards from 100 by sevens, out loud. If this takes you longer than 30 seconds, you do not use your brain very much. It takes me about five seconds. Here is another one: take a two-digit number, and square it in your head. I can do it in few seconds. And believe it or not, this sort of mental mathematics comes in handy very often. How did I learn it? Through education. This is why we learn times tables in third grade, because simple calculations are part of everyday life. The invention of the calculator did not invalidate the need for these rudimentary calculations. And yes, there were Luddites who said that the invention of the calculator would mean the end of education. And yes, there were Luddites who said that the invention of the internet would mean the end of higher education—you would never have to go to the library and research things! Yes, and that was a good thing—the internet was a time-saving invention. Is AI different? I don’t know.

Funny fact about me: I kept my textbooks from college and both instances of graduate school. All of them. And I’m frequently glad that I did. In the course of my work, every so often, I will have to do a little math. I never understood the people who rented their textbooks, which is pretty much everyone. Yes, you get the education, but you forget the education over time. I like having all that knowledge on my shelf that I can refer back to. I have a lot of ideas on education. Memorization is stupid, especially today (one of the reasons I hate the CFA). If you ever need a formula, you can always look it up online. But thinking will never go out of style. Thinking is the entire purpose of education. These so-called leaders in business and politics that I described, these people that do a lot of thinking, a big reason they are in those positions is because they were better at reasoning than anyone else. If you use AI as some kind of bush league pinch-hitter, you will never develop those faculties. You will be stupid. Maybe you have other things going for you: looks, personality, sense of humor, virtue—but without intelligence, they are practically useless. And intelligence without virtue is Nick Fuentes.