Beyond the Answer: The Importance of Critical Thinking in AI Engagement
Let me start this off by saying just how invaluable a tool AI has become for me. The countless questions that enter my mind on a daily basis many times go unanswered. The increasing demand for these questions to become answered has pushed me to begin using AI as the tool it has become in the hopes that through the process of getting my questions answered, I can begin expanding the possibilities.
Questions around what’s possible, where you can go, what you can do also come into the scope now that were previously outside of it providing for opportunities previously inaccessible. For example, I need a next spot to go to inside of Turkey. My many questions I was able to ask which eventually allowed my questions to become more targeted. What started out as questions on the level of countries to go to became closer and closer to what might provide the best experience at the most affordable price.
The questions upon questions eventually led me to leave Istanbul and enter Bursa, a city I didn’t even know was there just 2 hours away from Istanbul but significantly cheaper in terms of food, housing, resources, and so on, as well as being far less compressed in terms of people and buildings pushed together while more people are moving in filling up the spaces in between leaving less and less room between entities. Bursa feels much more like a smaller city, in fact I am told it is one of the smallest. This is still largely Muslim country, but the people are quite kind and that’s easy to say provided you can make the right friends.
Now, AI has begun answering for me questions that I didn’t even know I had yet but that would eventually be there as a result of the questions I had now begun asking. But with that idea in mind I think it is fair to address the elephant in the room … the fact that just because I am able to ask the questions does not mean that the answers are always correct, no, and I’ll give you a solid example of that as well. In order to answer the question I’m posing, I use gaming as an example as I am an avid gamer with games some of which I know the world’s of inside and out. If you pose certain questions to AI, it will answer those questions as if it knows the answer when in reality, the mechanics for which it speaks to don’t exist in the game being asked about. Even if part of the question lies outside your knowledge space, the entirety of the answer won’t be viable because the game doesn’t work like that.
That is to say, AI can be full of shit and just answering whatever it can by virtue of how it thinks games in general work when it’s never played the game and even if it did whether or not the mechanics work in such way remains to be seen. What I’m getting at is that the bullshit it answers game questions with may or may not extend into the way it answers questions about other things, sometimes more important things that you need not only certainty around but factual information when in fact, it’s possible when factual information is not present, certainty with the wrong information, in the mind of AI, can get the job done.
My point at its conclusion lands at this … just take what you hear from AI with a grain of salt and keep in mind that there is no perfect system and while AI can give you all kinds of answers to questions you didn’t even know you had, it constantly requires updates and upgrades as this technological system continues improving and giving more readily the kind of answers that actually fit the reality you and I are taking part in now.
