E-Bikes of the Mind

There's a beautiful Steve Jobs quote that I came across just yesterday, and it fits so well with the theme of yesterday's email that I'll share it here in full:

“I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good. But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts. And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”

What's special about the bicycle, and makes the metaphor so beautiful, is that, while it's a tool, it's still powered entirely by the human body, what we would call self-propelled. In this view (expressed in the 1980s), the computer takes our thinking, the output of our minds, and makes it go further.

AI takes it up a notch, and so we can compare its use to the various types of electric bikes:

• Those that come with a small motor providing just a bit of assistance to your pedal strokes, letting you go faster with more ease, but still requiring you to pedal. If you stop, they stop as well.

• Those that require no effort from you at all.

• (And if we continue along the e-theme but drop the bike, there are the mobility scooters from the movie Wall-E.)

There's nothing inherently wrong with either type, depending on your needs. But you're not getting any physical exercise with the full-assist version. Whether that's a problem depends on whether you get any exercise at all in your life.

And so it is with AI and tools that do our thinking for us. Nothing wrong with that. We are a tool-using species, after all. We just have to ensure that critical parts of ourselves don't atrophy, causing all sorts of problems.