At the time of writing this post, there’s some sort of AI hype going around, and some of the testimonies is that AI make people “learn faster” or “doing stuff faster”. With that in mind, let’s talk about how this mentality can be bad.
First off, some people want to “learn faster”, and i’m like and then what? What would these people do after learning as fast as they can? Scrolling social media? If that is your goal, then i think you are putting the horse before the cart.
Personally, i try to have this “student mentality” where i treat learning as daily activity. I don’t want to rush my learning process because i don’t want to have a premature knowledge. In my unscientific observation, the biggest problem of self-learner is that some of them tend to be “overconfident”. Those people tend to blindly believe with the only reference they have, without even considering that the reference can be misleading. As a self-learner myself, this is the reason i don’t want my learning phase to end as fast as possible. I don’t want to be overconfident and think that i’ve learn everything that is to learn. There’s a possibility that what i’ve learn this far is not accurate, especially if i don’t have any experience with the topic.
If you just blindly trust what AI say without any experience in the subject, then i think it can be more harmful rather than helpful. AI can be good to find the unknown, finding something that we didn’t know before, and then find some proper references for those subject. We could say that AI make the process of finding the unknown faster than reading the documentation ourself, but are we really learning faster that way? How can we be sure that we’re done learning the subject? If you are trying to learn as fast as possible, you might set up yourself for premature knowledge.
Now, let go into “doing stuff faster”, again, and then what? In the past, i’ve been working so fast that my team leader asking me to slow down because other teammates can not keep up with my pace, and that was before the current AI hype cycle. Whether you believe me or not, i’ve been in a position to do things as fast as possible and that do more harm to the team rather than being helpful.
You might be thinking, “then your teammates need to raise up their pace”, and then what? We are racing to see who can finish the most tasks and got burned along the way? Believe it or not, i’ve experience that too. For some reason, the people on the teams trying to compete to see who can finish the most task in the team, this happen in the current AI hype cycle. In those team, i’m the slow one because i’ve seen how exhausted my teammates in previous team when i set the pace too high, so i intentionally slowing down pace. But, that does not mean i become slow, i just putting off my result out there.
Here’s an example, let’s say i need to make some feature, i already done that with “mechanism A”, but i did not submit “mechanism A” and instead i am trying to brainstorming again and change “mechanism A” to “mechanism B”, and then i have another idea and change “mechanism B” to “mechanism C”. After that, i don’t really have any inspiration to improve “mechanism C” so i submit “mechanism C”. That’s what i mean by slowing down, i just putting off the result.
That’s why i feel like “doing stuff faster” is not always a good thing, especially when we are working with a team. Setting the pace too high might not be sustainable in the long run. Unless that’s your goal, you don’t want to stay long enough in the industry.
Another example of “doing stuff faster” is instant messaging. When the first instant messaging application appear, a lot of people enjoying it, they be like “wow, we can contact other people instantly” and then years latter realizing that instant messaging setting the bar too high for how fast we should respond. Because of instant messaging, a lot of people expect us to respond immediately, it’s like our entire time is just waiting on instant messaging application. These expectation can create anxiety in some cases, and one of them is when working remotely. When we are working remotely, we can working from anywhere as long as we have internet access, but the dark side of working remotely is that, when we don’t separate working and resting phase, we will be working 24 hours a day. And if our company did not have a clear policy, we will be in sword of damocles situation, basically it’s like we have a sword hanging above our head all day long.
These mindset that we need to be “faster” or the expectation for something to be “instant” can be harmful for the society in some cases, so we need to keep that mindset in check.