Often, I find myself prompting Claude like I’d prompt an incredibly high-context, patient, impossible-to-offend colleague – in other words, I’m blunt, short, and speak in a lot of shorthand. And Claude responds to my asks basically perfectly.
You might think this is a good thing. Certainly, it’s very useful. But beneath all of this I have a sense of lurking horror – AI systems have got so useful that the thing that will set humans apart from one another is not specific hard-won skills for utilizing AI systems, but rather just having a high level of curiosity and agency.
In other words, in the era where these AI systems are true ‘everything machines’, people will out-compete one another by being increasingly bold and agentic (pun intended!) in how they use these systems, rather than in developing specific technical skills to interface with the systems.
We should all intuitively understand that none of this will be fair. Curiosity and the mindset of being curious and trying a lot of stuff is neither evenly distributed or generally nurtured. Therefore, I’m coming around to the idea that one of the greatest risks lying ahead of us will be the social disruptions that arrive when the new winners of the AI revolution are made – and the winners will be those people who have exercised a whole bunch of curiosity with the AI systems available to them.
This is why I need to make a practice of exercising curiosity with these tools and also explains why I feel the need to force my friends into this paradigm as well.
The only hard limit is yourself. You need to want something and be curious enough to articulate it.