Use it or lose it

AI is hear to stay.

To what extent you decide to use it in your life is up to you, but it’s going to be there in some way, shape, or form. Your children will grow up with the transition from mostly human to mostly AI. Your grandchildren won’t know a time when AI wasn’t a part of daily activities.

I’m the last generation that knew what it was like to not have the internet.

It’s an awesome resource, and being an electrical and computer engineer, having a hand in directly supporting its rise is one of the perks in my chosen profession.

AI engineering is a thing now, and it adds in a skill that most technical types are…poor…at.

Communication.

That brings me to the dark side of AI for high-agency individuals, the invisible line that can be crossed without knowing it.

Skill atrophy resulting from outsourcing too much to AI.

That’s what I want to mentally munch on today.

Losing your edge

How many languages can you speak?

I can speak two: English and Mandarin.

There was a time that I only spoke Mandarin. It was a brief moment in my life between the ages of 2 and 4 when it was all I spoke. I hadn’t been exposed to English all that much back in the 80s because my parents only spoke Mandarin at home.

Then one day, I started going to daycare.

It was a slow shift, but it accelerated within months. I went from only speaking Mandarin to my parents to only speaking English to my friends. While I could still understand it, I didn’t really speak it all that much except when I was poked and prodded by my classmates. It wasn’t until I started going to Chinese school at the age of 7 that I realized something.

I could no longer speak the language.

It wasn’t that I couldn’t understand it either, it was that the act of generating sentences and phrases was no longer within my natural capabilities. If you’ve ever learned a non-native language, then you know what I mean. You can read and write. You are functionally literate. But you can’t piece together a conversation to save your life.

It just doesn’t flow anymore.

The same phenomenon happens across every skill that you possess. It’s called the Ebbinghaus curve, named after the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus. He characterized the rate at which we naturally forgot things over time if you didn’t repeat the exercise of refreshing your memory within a reasonable amount of time. While the simplified math equation used to model it didn’t fit all that well, it did highlight an important aspect of the brain:

If you don’t use it, you’re gonna lose it.

While my own experience with Mandarin wasn’t quite so extreme, it was a powerful realization. I didn’t mind it so much because I didn’t think it was all that important to me as a kid, and puberty didn’t help the situation much either.

I went through a rebellion phase where nothing of my Chinese heritage mattered.

Desperate to fit in here in the Deep South in the 90s, I didn’t care whether or not I could effectively communicate in Mandarin so long as I could get by in class. I limped along and stuttered and struggled. Reading became a chore similar to my struggles to learn English as a toddler. Smiling and nodding at monthly potlucks with the rest of the Chinese families became the default, not just for me but for the rest of us first generation kids in the group as well.

It wasn’t until high school that something shifted in me.

I felt like a foreigner in my own home. Speaking English to my parents while they spoke Mandarin to me felt odd. It was like being in “Ocean’s Eleven” where everyone could somehow understand the Chinese acrobat in the crew even though he didn’t speak a single word of English.

I wasn’t part of the family anymore.

So I started speaking (painfully) at home. I took more pride in my multicultural heritage. I struggled to speak to my parents only in Mandarin so that I could reconnect with them on the communication level. When I went to college, I chose advanced beginner classes offered exclusively for students like me.

There were A LOT more than I expected in the class.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one to go through this experience. We all went through a similar process of rebelling, regretting, and reconnecting. Learning together in a group, it wasn’t just that I started reinforcing my first language. I was rediscovering my heritage as an Asian American. It eventually lead me to taking a tech job overseas, living in Taiwan for a few years, and fully understanding the struggles of my parents.

Now, I’m one of the teachers at the very same school where I learned Mandarin decades ago, with my oldest starting there this year.

Life has a way of bringing you full circle.

Cool story, bro…

Using technology to offload what appears to be routine and mundane in your execution is like walking a tightrope between two skyscrapers.

It’s not just language that suffers from lack of use. It’s any skill that you take for granted. When was the last time you did multiplication in your head or added up the price of the items in your shopping cart (bro, do you even shop, bro?)

Calculators and phones are great for these types of things, and now you can ask AI to do that for you.

Not only that, but you can use AI to navigate many more situations and challenges in life.

• Don’t want to write that essay? Get AI to do it for you.

• Don’t want to program that particular function? Get AI to do it for you.

• Don’t want to plan out that project for the capstone course? Get AI to do it for you.

The saying that I harp on is a rule of thumb that many people are going to ignore for productivity’s sake:

Don’t automate or abstract away what you haven’t done to proficiency.

As an engineer, I know this quite well now.

As a content creator, this is a humbling reality.

When I first started writing again, I realized that I couldn’t even string together a short post that made any sense at all. The ideas didn’t come. The words squeezed out of me like an old tube of toothpaste. Writing an article was like running a marathon in the middle of summer with maximum humidity.

As we gradually integrate AI into our lives, this is something to keep in mind:

Your proficiency in any skill will suffer if you defer its execution to only addressing corner cases.

It’s like cooking consistently for weeks and then offloading it to your spouse.

One day, after months of complacency, they aren’t available. You’re on the hook again.

You won’t be able to even boil water.

“It’s like riding a bike.”

Sure…and when was the last time you did that?

Mindful maintenance

Parents encounter this truth with a frightening pace as their children get older.

Think you remember how to do long division? Do you remember the sentence structure diagram with subject, predicate, nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs? Do you remember important historic dates? What’s a polygon? Can you still recite the preamble for the Constitution? When was the last time you went roller skating or ice skating or did that spectacular backflip on the trampoline?

We loose skills and forget things because we don’t use them and we don’t refresh them. There’s nothing wrong with that. Imagine putting together a system where you had to refresh EVERYTHING in your life on a regular basis. Very few people have the ability to recall to that savant level, and the ones that do often possess this ability at the cost of something else in life.

If it truly matters to you, make it a priority.

Having AI as a part of our lives is both a blessing and a curse. Be careful of abusing this technology.

You might lose more than you gain if you don’t.

What do you think of AI and its potential?