AI v Thinking

Many years ago my boss walked past my desk and was furious to see me staring into space. ‘What are you doing just sitting there staring!’ He shouted. ‘I am thinking’ I replied. ‘What?’ He said, very red in the face at my impertinence  ‘I don’t pay you to sit here and think!’. 

It takes a nano second to have an innovative idea but you need space and time to work out how to turn the idea into something useful. We are so intent on looking busy (for our bosses to see) and feeling important if we are ‘doing’ that there is little value given to thinking time.

Architects are supposed to be creative and innovative. This requires thinking time as well as production time. The most valuable of these is the thinking time. Nowadays, with a business of my own, I am free to think as much as I like. 

As a result I have even had time to think about and develop innovative systems and processes that speed up the production of information - giving me even more thinking time to be creative, which is was I am paid for.

With the overwhelming speed of development of AI one wonders what will happen to thinking time. AI does not have opinions but is a very impressive tool. AI can give us information in an instant. It can generate artwork. It can create a poem about a fat man eating a MacDonalds hamburger in the style of Dante’s The Divine Comedy (try it and enjoy!) The most popular AI app promotion says ‘Get more creative and free up your time. Discover, learn and innovate’.

Let us hope that AI will give us more time to think and be creative. It could, of course, make us think less.

The late Herbert A. Simon, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economic sciences in 1978, made a prescient prediction. ‘In an information rich world the wealth of information creates a dearth of something else…. the attention of its recipients’. The solution was clear ‘to allocate that attention efficiently among overabundance of information sources that might consume it’.