I read a piece this week about what artificial intelligence is doing to our minds.
It was well written. It asked good questions.
Am I thinking more clearly or less. Am I still doing the work or is the machine doing it. Where does my own voice end.
Seven minutes of questions.
And at the end, one answer.
Stay aware.
I want to tell you why that answer is worth almost nothing.
I spent my working life around men and machines.
Mines. Construction. Places where a mistake costs a hand.
And in every one of those places, somebody eventually says the same thing.
Just be careful.
Be careful is not a control.
Be careful is what you say when you have not built anything.
You know what is a control?
A guard on the blade.
A lockout tag on the switch.
A checklist you read out loud before the shift, whether you feel like it or not.
Those things do not care how you feel that morning.
That is the entire point of them.
Here is why.
Awareness works fine when you are rested. When you are not busy. When nothing is riding on it.
But that is not when you need it.
You need it at the end of a long day. When you are behind. When the answer that came back sounds good and you are tired and you would like it to be right.
That is the exact moment awareness quits.
Every man who ever lost a finger was aware of the blade.
Now put that on the screen in front of you.
You ask the machine a question. It gives you a paragraph. Clean sentences. Three sources at the bottom.
It reads like something a careful person wrote.
Are you going to check those three sources?
Today, maybe.
Tuesday at four o’clock, with something else waiting?
Be honest.
This is not a thing I am guessing about.
Last week a newspaper in Australia went through the submissions people had sent to their parliament.
They found made-up studies. Research attributed to real professors who never wrote it. Some submissions where not one single source was real.
And then the committees quoted those submissions in their own reports.
The fake went in and came back out wearing the government’s name on it.
Every one of those people meant well.
Every one of them was aware that AI makes mistakes.
It did not save them.
There is a detail in that story I have not been able to put down.
Those reporters found that when you search one of the fake sources, the search engine’s own AI will sometimes write you a summary of it.
The machine invents a source.
Then another machine describes it back to you like it exists.
Now you have confirmation.
Awareness does not survive that. Nothing you can feel survives that.
Only a rule does. Go find the actual document. Open it. Read the line.
Not because you are suspicious. Because that is the rule and the rule runs whether you are suspicious or not.
So here is what I did instead of staying aware.
I wrote it down.
I built a set of rules and I put them in a file, and every time I sit down with the machine, the file loads first.
One rule says a source is a claim all by itself. Check that it exists. Then check that it says what the machine says it says. Those are two different checks and they fail differently.
Another says when it does not know, it says so, instead of writing a nice paragraph over the hole.
Another says it has to challenge me. Every single time. Not when it feels like it. Every time.
None of that is mindfulness.
It is a guard on the blade.
I am not going to sit here and tell you that you need my file.
That is not the point of this.
The point is that you need something written down before you need it.
Because the moment you need it is the moment you will not think of it.
Write your own three rules if you like. Here is a start.
One. If it gives you a source, open the source. Not sometimes.
Two. If it tells you something you were hoping to hear, that is when you slow down, not when you speed up.
Three. If you cannot say where a fact came from, it does not go in front of anybody else.
Tape it to the wall by the computer. I am serious.
That article ended by asking whether we will stay conscious enough to shape this thing.
I would put it a different way.
Consciousness is not a plan.
A plan is a plan.
Be careful is what you say before somebody gets hurt.
A guard on the blade is what you build so they do not.
” Attic Thoughts”-library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
Contact: micvicfaust@gmail.com
This post was drafted with AI governed assistance and reviewed and directed by Michael S. Faust Sr. before publication.
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