As I mentioned earlier, I’m learning to play the guitar. And right now, I’m not very good at it.
When I first embarked upon this new hobby, I worried that my skill with piano and to a lesser extent voice would lead to frustration with a new instrument. That I’d wince every time I hit the wrong string or screwed up the tempo because my ear expects perfection.
Much to my delight, this hasn’t proved to be the case. Do I love hearing a sour note? Of course not. But one sour note doesn’t spoil the overall experience of learning something new and creating music with my own two hands. Because I know this part is necessary if I’m ever going to be an accomplished guitarist. The only way is through, to mangle a cliché. Every mistake is a learning opportunity and a chance to get better.
But part of the joy of learning guitar is that I have to — nay, get to — set aside the expectation that I should know what I’m doing. We don’t get many opportunities to do this as adults.
Learning to play guitar has reconnected me with proto-Samantha.
The other day, my husband asked me if I truly loved playing piano growing up. Of course I said yes, but I thought critically about why I loved it. It wasn’t just because I loved the sound of music or the pleasure of the keys responding to my touch. I found immense satisfaction in the process of learning, of incremental progress as I mastered new scales, new chords, new songs. Of entering contests and winning. Of always having another exciting mountain to climb.
Even if I’d never become an excellent pianist, I believe I’d have loved the learning of it.
As is often the case these days, I’ve been thinking about this in the context of AI.
Understandably, people are worried that because AI can take care of lower-level reasoning and tasks, students and junior workers simply aren’t learning the basics. Machines can now write essays, synthesize information and solve complex problems. But to be a high-level strategic employee, you need critical thinking skills, and you usually can only develop those by mastering the basics through grunt work.
Now, the issue isn’t necessarily that AI eliminates grunt work. It’s that AI can eliminate the very cognitive effort that makes certain kinds of work educational.
AI is extraordinarily useful when the objective is to produce something. But what happens when the objective is to develop the ability to produce something?
And of course there’s the very real and valid worry about cognitive offloading — the delegation of thinking to a machine — and what that’s doing to our poor brains, which need challenges and novelty to stay young and healthy. I don’t dispute the value of offloading some tasks; technology has been doing this for decades (looking at you, TI-81). But AI enables us to offload critical thinking skills, and that’s particularly dangerous for those who haven’t been around long enough to develop them the old-fashioned way.
I think right now, it’s more important than ever to have pursuits for which there is no cheat code — no Googling the answer, no AI shortcut. Making and correcting mistakes is what encodes knowledge and skill.
I’m bad at guitar right now, and I love it. Even if I never play beautifully, the very act of fumbling while trying is beautifully human.