Everything’s getting faster. We press a button and suddenly it’s better, more interesting, more colourful, more beautiful. But what happens when the world runs entirely on shortcuts and we’ve forgotten the long paths—what then when the system fails?
We don’t know exactly how it got there, but we see and read that it’s now better, smoother, more fluid, prettier. The journey there? Lost.
We shoved something into a black box and out the other side comes this polished little text with its wow factor. Was this what I was thinking? I can barely recognise it anymore. But it’s certainly better than the raw idea in my head.
We can only learn, only improve, when we understand what’s happening. In the AI age we’re just input providers and output collectors. That’s pretty unfair, actually—the machine learns from us, from our questions, information, improvements, feedback. But we learn essentially nothing. We just get something out.
Convenient as that is, we end up becoming soggy mops. Instead of engaging deeply with something and training our brain muscles, we hang bored against the ropes, getting more and more saturated and slower.
Yet these intelligent interns need our curiosity and enthusiasm to develop anything truly new.
This post first appeared in German on reinergaertner.de, where I’ve been writing since 1997 — back when the internet still had that new-car smell. An AI assistant helped with the translation under my supervision. If something reads a bit odd, blame the Denglish in my head.