The Victory of AI Over the Inefficient Learner
There's always a degree of self-discovery or self-revelation that accompanies the process of learning in human beings, which is typically unintended... And while I can't pinpoint exactly what I discovered about myself, I carry that feeling of flourishing with me wherever I go.
It might seem counterintuitive, but just as everyone is learning vibe coding, I began taking an online course in front-end development.
I got away with two decades of digital marketing never needing to learn it because there have always been developers and designers who are willing to do the dirty work for me, but it has honestly been a source of insecurity for me for just as long.
And while vibe coding is a valid way of getting things done, I want to be able to understand exactly what AI will be doing for me. I know I will personally never find peace if I didn't have a functional level of skill and knowledge in this area.
And so after more than a month, I'm finally doing some CSS. Obviously, I've got a long way to go before I can even build entire webpages myself, but code doesn't look as scary to me now as it did just several weeks ago. I can actually look at front-end code and see something intelligible, not alien language. I can write simple HTML and give it color and shape. I'm learning.
Just not as efficiently as an AI would. Not even close.
No, it isn't lost on me just how ridiculously inefficient this process of learning is, especially if I put my manager's hat on.
An AI would learn what I learned in a month in a blip. Google's chief scientist, Jeff Dean, says AI will be as good as junior software engineers in a year.
So is there any point to what I'm doing beyond a stubborn, perhaps impractical desire to understand how coding actually works?
Well, there is. But I only realized it while I was taking the course: I realized that I was having fun with it. And that's something that AI cannot achieve, no matter how efficient they are at learning.
But wait a minute—what does fun have to do with it?
Aren't you supposed to learn new skills because you want to upgrade your skillset to get better at doing your job, finish it faster or get more results, or perhaps become more hirable if you're in the job market? Fun doesn't have anything to do with those things at all. If an AI can do all that without having fun, that's totally fine, and it's not a negative for AI as a tool.
"As a tool." See, that is where I think our present conundrum arises.
It seems to me that learning to human beings is far more than a process to absorb specialized knowledge to achieve a narrow predefined end, even though that's exactly what most of formal education and work training say on paper.
There's always a degree of self-discovery or self-revelation that accompanies the process of learning in human beings, which is typically unintended. I'm having fun learning about coding because I feel myself growing or getting enriched. I didn't count on that before I took the course, but I'm nevertheless pleased with it. Learning confers in me a deep sense of pride and satisfaction that I understand something about programming language today that I did not yesterday. Something in me unfolds, like a chapter of a book that has always been there but I've never read, and I can feel the resonance of discovering these new capacities continue long after I've turned off my computer.
And while I can't pinpoint exactly what I discovered about myself, I carry that feeling of flourishing with me wherever I go.
We often hear about people loving their jobs. We have parents and grandparents who've spent many, many years in their chosen fields until their work has become an inseparable part of them. The lenses by which they view the world and engage with it are inextricable from the countless personal experiences they've gone through their work.
They did not simply acquire the formal skills and knowledge bases of their professions. They picked up bits of life from them.
And that awareness is not something intended. It's not part of the resource library. Or the training modules. It's just something that happens regardless. An inevitable byproduct.
This highlights the conflict between our institutions treating human beings as tools, as mere cogs in the productivity machine, and their natural and limitless capacity to imagine, learn, and redefine.
On the one hand, our structured educational opportunities (starting from our schools to our workplaces) want to reduce us to efficient, results-oriented instruments performing highly specialized tasks. But on the other hand, these same institutions can't prevent us from getting so much more from the standardized curricula and training exercises. And, in the long run, the unexpected lessons we learn from working our jobs or pursuing our careers might even be more valuable than the formalized trainings they rode on, in the sense that they can impact how we conduct our lives. The opposite is also true: the inadvertent lessons we get from them can be detrimental to us. How often have we heard of people losing their loved ones and ending their very own lives because of their jobs? Many of us are taught "competitiveness," and we unwittingly build our entire worldview and sense of self around the concept, risking the collapse of everything more precious in the process.
We just can't help being more than a tool because we are not.
Businesses keep measuring us by how fast we're deployment ready. But this whole time, we've been training for so much more, whether we're aware of it or not.
We're training for life. The entirety of it, not just the time we spend actually turning in deliverables.
We instinctively search for something more, do something more, and absorb something more, much more beyond the boundaries set for us as if it will be the death of us should we acquiesce completely to the initial demands.
That is our essential inefficiency.
But I'm afraid that as more and more business owners and CEOs can't escape the fact that AI is more efficient at learning and executing tasks than people, the wider will this gap be between what our superiors expect from us, and what we can naturally offer. A system that is geared towards accumulating wealth at the cost of everything is fundamentally irreconcilable with the inexhaustible potential and irreducible existence of a human being. Because our work is incidental to our life learning. It is not the point of it.
And in this way, we've already lost to AI.
For hundreds of years, capitalism has been searching for the perfect tool, which only learns as much as is needed to complete a task and return a profit. And for hundreds of years, it tolerated the inefficiency of people because there was no other alternative. Until now.