Too Shallow to Dive

Recently everyone started using a prompt to make AI pictures in Gemini. What a blessing for camera-shy people like me who would rather deny taking pictures than making some funny poses, right?

Also, Gemini now gives you suggested email replies without even asking. I used to look blankly at some irritating emails for hours to figure out how to reply professionally without waking up my sarcastic side. Now I won't even have to bother. Because Gemini replies to all emails the same, irritating or not.

Everyone has a different opinion about using AI, which is normal. From world war to world cup, different opinions are always the consistent side. It's not our fault, though. We have been taught this way. Think different, make a different opinion than others, look different to stand out, think out of the box. Otherwise you will be lost in the sea of people. So we have to have different opinions from others. But that's another topic.

AI has been walking beside human kind for a long time. We have been using AI unknowingly in our daily life. We have read books, watched sci-fi movies, imagined a life where AI would be at our arms length. But in any sci-fi movie,the hero would always stick to humanity rather than go with the flow and become the victim of high tech. Because letting a mindless creature take the reins was never a good idea.

Like all other inventions, AI also has pros and cons. I don't have to tell you about them because you'll find tons of articles and research about it on the internet (another black hole where you might enter willingly but won't be able to come out easily). What I think about AI is also not your concern. I mean, what new topic would I add that hasn't been said already. No, I won't waste your time.

By all means, use AI. Its main purpose should be to facilitate human tasks, to amplify human potential. But don’t let it replace the human mind; the greatest gift that our creator has bestowed upon us. Don't lose the gold mine to find a piece of glass posed as diamond.

If technology starts to do all the thinking, our world of imagination will shrink.

My grandfather used to say: “The human mind is a bottomless ocean. You can keep diving into it till the end of your days and will see no end of it.” He had a lot more to say about humans and how they are all donkeys and needed beating but at least this one quote made me want to read more and more. I wanted to prove him wrong and show him the end of that ocean he keeps mentioning. Trust me I'm still trying, but he is gone.

When I was in primary school my dad used to say: “ Your brain is like a knife, it gets sharper the more you use it.” Like father, like son, I have to say. They both used to love using metaphor too much. He used to say it mostly to make me practice more and more but both of them were right. So were all the scholars in human history. The human mind is the most magnificent, dangerous, delusional weapon in the whole universe. Can you imagine some stupid genius man who decided to go to space just because his curious mind wanted to know what's up there? Or some guy who saw a bird flying and got envious and wanted to fly too? Lunatics, right?

But I see nowadays we don't like to use that cute little brain of ours. We run to our friend AI any chance we get and ask for help. I think it started with Siri, then Alexa; now Chatgpt, Perplexity, Gemini, Grok and a lot more. Meta added its AI in WhatsApp without even asking. We used to go to Google for anything we wanted to know. Now search engines also lost their charms to these Bots. We are so busy that we don’t have time to read books. We ask blinkit to summarize them for us.

Do you know how long it takes for a fast reader to read a 600 page book? At least a whole day. For a reader like me, at least 4 days. (I take a lot of breaks, that's on me). Then if you want to write a review on the book, for a normal human being it takes at least another day. I recently gave 3 different AI tools to review the same book. Do you know how long it took them? The highest was 1 minute, that's also because I was using mobile internet. One AI tool even asked me if it can create a list for my next reads based on my choice of book. Too easy, too boring.

I'm an old school. I still love to go to the book stores, spend hours looking at the books on the shelves tilting my head to the left. There is no other way to read the names for me. I'll go through the rows over and over to choose just one book. It's a choice I prefer to make by myself. So thanks but no thanks, Perplexity, maybe some other day. And I would choose a human review over a chatbot's suggestions anytime.

First internet, then Apps, now AI, our privacy and security have been infiltrated several times. I start getting ear-pod ads if I complain about my ear-pod while talking to someone. And we used to say walls have ears. Now my phone is the double agent for all the app companies.

I'm fine with it too. But can we at least not use AI to look for book reviews or to understand any news article or writing research paper? How long would it take for you to read the whole article to understand what it's saying? I'm sure we spend more time on doom scrolling or window shopping on Amazon or something else. Just read the article or the book that you want to know about. Write the paper yourself that you need to submit. Use your own tools a little bit.

Technology has made our lives a lot easier than it was before. At least don't become so crippled that technology becomes your limbs and soul.

Taking reference from a colleague who recently said, you should use AI as a tool, not as your crutch. Seeking help from AI for research, making sure your source is correct or even asking AI to give you an outline for your write up is good. Sometimes even I'm thankful that I can get help from Chatgpt. But when I see someone abusing AI and producing a 100% AI content without any remorse, it makes me sad. More so when the content is really good.

But that's your choice. You don't believe in your creativity, that's your problem to deal with. I still believe in the excellence of the beautiful human mind.

Doing research, writing articles or papers, even creating entertaining contents for social media are getting more common day by day. I’m not going to talk about creating nasty content to take revenge on someone you dislike or making videos of metro rail accidents, or other questionable stuff. Those are beyond my understanding.

But do we want our kids to go to AI to solve math problems? Or give them a summary of their text book on the night before their exams?

I know, the regular education system has loop holes. Our children are forced to memorize rather than learn. But I can still recite the poem from my textbook that I memorized in class 5. Now that I’m old enough, I understand what the poem means. I remember reading a small story of Shatarchandra from my Bangla textbook and poems of Shukumar Roy that I can relate to now, when life isn’t the same anymore. I feel we should all have these experiences in life, small but impactful.

Figuring out how to make a kite on your own, playing a board game with friends, getting lost in a new city and asking a stranger to show you the address, choosing the next book you want to buy and reading the book sitting in a cozy cafe are some small experiences we should not throw away.

I'm sure reading a book or a paper will give you an experience that an AI made 200 characters review or summary can't. Not that I can stop you or it would matter too much to anyone now. But it will matter some day. Someday, when human kind will forget to use the best tool they had inbuilt themselves. Even the most powerful machine will get rusty if it's left alone for too long.

Read the book, watch the news on your huge smart TV, or on your phone. Read the newspaper article and talk to your friends. Debate about what you think, make your own opinion, how silly or unorthodox that might be. Let them judge you for not knowing the whole story and learn from them, go deep and bring out the root of it. Don’t just surf through the digital world on surface level. Dissect and inter-dissect the topic as long as you are not satisfied with it. Let your brain get tired of the whole facade. It's at least better than letting it sit in your head lazily. Because an idle brain is the devil's workshop. (Now I sound like my grandfather, LOL)

I’m not against using AI, I never was. I just want you to use it cautiously. Because the more you are replacing AI with your own mind, the more it will take space in your soul. The more you let it become your partner rather than your tool, the more your edges will get dull and you will become dependent on it. Even Tony Stark didn’t go to Jarvis to solve his own problems. Though most of his problems were his creations.

If we keep asking AI solutions for every simple problem, our mind will become too fragile to face challenges. If we stop making efforts to learn things ourselves then the bottomless ocean will become a shallow pond with no depth left to dive.