Approach everything… with curosity
I am dissatisfied when I ask ChatGPT or Claude.ai to write something for me. The writing has no life, no flair. It’s repeating patterns it’s been trained on, and the result is a pretty good imitation, but the voice is tinny and robotic. Anyone exploring AI has a similar experience; they test the robots on topics where they are the expert and quickly find it’s not creative, but impressively derivative. No art, no flair.
The point: there is a whole class of tasks where, job loss aside1, I am fine with robots doing the job with absolutely no flair. I need the job done safely, efficiently, and reliably. Every time. I require no flair for a car taking me from Point A to Point B. I want no pomp and circumstance. The perfect ride is one I forget immediately because nothing interesting happens.
When faced with change or an aggressive unknown, I take a deep breath, count to four, place my feet firmly on the ground, and ask, “Do I really understand what is going on here? Really?” I start with curiousity because curiousity informs action. Action creates consequence, and when consequence shows up, you start learning.
Here’s the thing. We are equally screwed and blessed. These contradictory states exist at the same time. It’s a paradox, a confusing, in-progress, contradictory mess. It’s a state I understand because I am a human who continues to learn and I’m curious how it’s going to turn out.
Teaching myself to love learning at a young age really changed the way I look at changes. It built confidence that I am capable of learning new things. It also gave me a super power to be calm in most situations. Anxiety comes from a state of unknown – humans fear the unknown. When you know that you have the capability to make the unknown known and build up the fortitude to accept that somethings will always be unknown, you kinda have a path forward to manage almost any situation in life.
Don’t fear the LLMs and the technological advances. One should be prepared that one’s skills might become irrelevant. However one need not fear that situation because there’s always a learning path forward.
P.S. Here’s my curiosity with this post. Michael Lopp, who is otherwise a famous speller and a magician with words, decided to mis-spell curiosity. I even checked alternative / british spellings.
