D-A-N-G-E-R Shortcut
Our MD Emily made the point after I wrote about Mr. Claude that one of the interesting things that’s going to happen in a world of widespread AI adoption is that outcomes are going to be commoditized, so it’s going to become really important, if you want to be successful, to understand process. In other words, everyone using AI is going to be able to get an answer to something, but if you don’t understand why it’s the answer, you won’t be able to judge whether it’s good, reasonable, or even correct.
So show your work, she advised. And make sure you tell your AI – Mr. Claude or whomever – to show its work too. Because if you can’t clearly see how an answer was derived, you should not be confident enough to act on it.
That’s when I told her about my dad, a university chemistry professor, who was also a big show your work guy and how I dreaded having to ask him for help in math or science in high school because I knew that if I did, the homework I was hoping to knock out in 20 minutes was going to become a 45-minute slog.
Because show your work.
For example, everybody knows there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, and 24 hours in a day and so therefore 86,400 seconds in a day. But if my dad and I were working on a problem together, he’d never let me just jump to a conclusion like that. Instead, I’d have to list out the conversion factors, cross out the denominators, all of it.
Process seemed like such a waste of time.
But dammit if he wasn’t right. Because as things get complicated, if you aren’t methodical about documenting the steps you took to arrive at an end, and if you didn’t get where you wanted, there’s no way to figure out why without starting over.
Everybody knows I love classic Pixar movies and Inside Out in particular. There’s a great scene in that movie that I quote all the time where the onetime imaginary friend Bing Bong (and yes, when he jumps off his rainbow rocket wagon into the memory dump so Joy can keep going while he is forgotten, I weep every time) is trying to help Joy and Sadness catch a ride on the train of thought to get back to headquarters and they come to a door that he says is a shortcut to the train station. But the sign above the door says "Danger Keep Out!” Sadness says they shouldn't go in there, but Bing Bong says, “What are you talking about? I go in here all the time. It’s a shortcut. See, D-A-N-G-E-R, shortcut.”
AI has the potential to help us achieve massive gains in efficiency. But if you treat it like a shortcut, D-A-N-G-E-R shortcut indeed.
– Tim
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