The Scam Called 'You Don't Have to Remember Anything'
Search engines and AI promise to replace memory, but that's a scam. You need prior knowledge to evaluate information. The opposite is true: you have to remember EVERYTHING to perform meaningful knowledge work. The bottleneck isn't external information—it's your internal processing power.
tl;dr
Search engines, note apps, and AI claim you don't need to remember anything. This is a scam. To benefit from the internet or AI, you need prior knowledge and a trained brain. Digital natives lack critical thinking skills because they work superficially. The bottleneck in knowledge work isn't external information—it's your internal processing power. ChatGPT can generate a training plan, but without deep knowledge, you can't evaluate if it's good. You have to remember EVERYTHING to perform meaningful knowledge work.
My Thoughts
While it looks like a rant, I think it pinpoints something that most of the “old generation” fears (well, I belong in the old generation more than I belong in the new one by the trends of the newest generation). The incapacity to learn about anything without using AI (aka LLMs) as the main source for knowledge.
I appreciate LLMs for making my job a bit more agile, and letting me explore some ideas while puking a lot of information that then I have to digest, but that is the point: unless you have worked on digesting information, eating will only give you a bellyache and the end of it will be about producing a turd rather than taking the most from the food.
The ChatGPT training plan example is perfect. It looks comprehensive, but if you don’t have the background knowledge to ask “What’s the difference between aerobic capacity and aerobic power?” or “How do volume and intensity factor in strength gains?”—you can’t evaluate if it’s actually good advice or generic fluff.
This is the trap: AI makes it easy to get answers, but harder to know if they’re the right answers. Without building that knowledge in your brain through deep processing, you’re just moving information around without understanding it.
I hope that with this power we take more advantage and work on better learning systems aided by LLMs instead of just substituting any knowledge source with it. The power is ours :D
This is my personal commentary on the original article. Please read the original article for the full context.