I started learning the abacus. Now I have questions about AI

My mother in law knows I’m a nerd.

She once gave me an abacus as a gift. Most people would probably be confused, even if they were too gracious to show it.

I straddle both ends of the spectrum depending on the day, but I noticed both extremes are uncomfortable places to sit. It’s tiring being on edge all the time, and frustrating when I’m not ascending to dietyhood like folks are promising.

I do want to point out one gap in both arguments, though. Interestingly, it’s the same gap:

What are people supposed do with their lives?

The AI debate is a process and tools question. I’m asking a “why” type of question: What should people strive to fill their lives with, from daily activities to long-term accomplishments? I’ll pose the same question, albeit in different flavors, to both camps:

To the anti-AI folks: What are you protecting?

What specifically do you think is important enough that only humans should EVER touch it? Is it creativity? Critical thinking? Self-expression? If AI were to take everything but one thing, what would you want to save?

Don’t get me wrong, I get the fear of losing myself; as I write this with my human fingers, I’m constantly tempted by the possibility of getting AI to help with the next paragraph, and feel the nagging fear that I’m not as good at writing as I was 6 months ago.

When I was fumbling around with that abacus, I wasn’t accomplishing anything that would give me super clear value. We all have tools much faster and more accurate that I will ever be with an abacus. Hell, I can do mental math for simple problems faster than I can do them on this gadget.

And yet the process of learning the abacus was doing things for me that no AI tool replicates out of the box: the feeling of learning a skill. The struggle that is absolutely necessary to accomplish it. And the feeling of success afterwards which is unique to using your own brain to build a new capability, and very much diluted when something does it for you.

But here’s where I think the anti-AI argument goes a little too far, at least when it’s a blanket statement of “avoid AI.” It basically says using a tool means you lose something about yourself. It sure can happen, but it depends on how and in what context you use it. If you work in IT and you use an auto-email response to basic questions with “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” I’d call that smart automation. But if you work in IT and AI is now responding to your mom’s emails for you, you might have lost something along the way.

So where do we draw the line?

To the pro-AI camp: Ok, now what?

Once you automate all the things you can, what then? What does your life look like? AI agents are checking and answering all your emails, your secret AI persona bot is replacing you in all work meetings, and you’ve got agents spraying AI slop in your tone of voice across all your socials on a regular (but seemingly organic) cadence. What do you now do with all your free time?

You’re also assuming you’re going to have free time at all, which, if you’re familiar with Parkinson’s law, you should know is a generous assumption:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

So if you're saving all this time without a good sense of the purpose, you're likely to be in a very similar place as you started.

It truly reminds me of a certain type of penny pincher. The ones who try to find any excuse to save a little money here and there, but their hoard of wealth often isn’t earmarked for something special; they’ve just gotten addicted to the habit of saving money that they forgot money is supposed to be spent on something.

Now just replace money with time and that’s how I see the AI pattern unfolding.

Saving money and using AI are not bad things. But hyper focusing on saving risks losing sight of the “for what?”

Beginner’s mind is underrated

As I’m enjoying being in the fun/frustrating zone of being intentionally dumb again, I realized there were a few things I had been missing. My life is probably like yours: full of a constant barrage of information that I have to do my best to filter something useful out of in order to be a somewhat productive person. When I have time. I rarely allow myself to enter the realm of the complete novice. Learning something almost entirely outside of my current experience, struggling through the basics and giving myself the opportunity to fail repeatedly before making some progress, and basking in the unique glow of that post-struggle eureka moment. All for something that I didn’t HAVE to do, but wanted to.

Of course, my recent explorations in AI tools made the lack of these feelings more obvious, but I’m not going to blame AI for their absence entirely. I’d unintentionally settled into maintenance mode, “just get by,” years before most people had ever heard the letters G, P, and T in sequence.

But AI definitely sped up my descent into brain-death, even as I was aware of the risks.

The noise surrounding AI

There seem to be two camps of AI thought-peddlers: On the pro-AI side you have the hype fanatics going “Imagine how godly you will be armed with AI, and how behind you are and will be once everyone else learns it!” On the other end, you have the catastrophic worriers claiming “AI will steal our knowledge and humanity, you’ll forget how to think and do things!” (Exaggerating to highlight the endpoints of the spectrum, not the average perspective)

Answering the big question for yourself

To answer the “so what” question, I highly suggest you start by removing AI and any other tools from the equation.

It’s a solution looking for a problem to solve.

I’m not quite egotistical enough to think I can suggest a specific course of action that applies to everyone, but I do have some good questions for you to ponder: What gives you a sense of purpose, a feeling of joy, and the ability to create value for others? These are not unique questions or concepts, but I see one or more of them noticeably absent in every conversation about AI.

Once you have some real answers for yourself, the tooling question becomes almost easy. For the things that check all the boxes, protect those parts of yourself even if you start incorporating AI and other tools in the mix. For the things that don’t? You can probably worry less.

In the meantime, I’m going to stop making this article longer and figure out how the hell you do division with an abacus.

My reaction was “wow, you really get me!”

It’s not that I’m a Luddite. I used my TI-83+ all the way up until cell phones and computers made them redundant.

But I like gadgets. And old timey things. And objects with a high fiddle factor.

So obviously, this would be my new obsession, right?

Well, not for a year or so. It just sat there for a while as the chaos of life took over. You get it. Work, child care, the… world, I guess? Vague gesture at everything...

But that brings me to today. I had some unexpected extra time and came across the abacus again. Some quick “how-to” searches and a bit of fiddling, and I’m re-experiencing a familiar, but almost foreign joy of learning something completely new for the first time again. I’m literally re-learning how to add, subtract, and multiply in my late 30s.