2025-04-03
Sometimes, I recall one of Steve Jobs' ads where he said that "computers are like bicycles for mind" to him. He couldn't be more right. In some shape or form, computers and semiconductor-based electronics are now at the core of everything in any city and play crucial role in rural areas. In Ukraine, you can find a long-forgotten Xbox 360 or DVD player at a rural house quite often, and almost every child older than six years owns at least a dumbphone for an obvious purpose of connection on long distances, while at school, or playing outside with friends. And smartphones make up for the absolute majority of handheld market even in developing countries. It's obvious that these kind-of computers became ubiquitous and power our daily lives
Advance a little further, and you'll see that a lot of services we use daily are dependent on the internet - the network that connects most of smart devices. Even you are reading this article on the internet, on my Neocities page. Yes, the computer became a bicycle for human mind. But what if we glimpse into the future?
Now, we witness the advent of AI agents - a natural step further from ML-based translation in Google Translate, semantic search, and Google Assistant. They can take actions on our behalf. The most famous ones include Cursor IDE, GitHub Copilot, OpenAI Operator, and Google Gemini. These tools are capable of autonomy comparable to just "firing and forgetting" - Cursor and Copilot write code, Operator visits sites, and Gemini can utilize some of Google services and take actions on Android phone in a way Assistant could.
Here is where AI becomes a car for your mind, not just a bicycle. While bicycle requires some manual pedaling, on car, all you need is to steer at a right moment, without any physical effort. But guess who is healthier - the person who actively pedals their bicycle or passively sits in a car, both four hours a day? On a bicycle, your legs get stronger, your lungs develop increased capacity, and your heart has less risk to falter. On a car, though, you are just sitting, hence it has a lot to share with an office job, and that's assuming you are riding an electric vehicle, because pollution also exists. But hey, your [CAR BRAND NAME] gets you there so much faster, eh? And let's be real, there are some distances no human cyclist can take without at least installing an electric engine onto their bicycle.
And how about AI vs. now-traditional computer-assisted work? Every single programmer that uses/used AI tools I have ever met both in person and on the internet tells me the same thing: AI rewrites muscle memory in a way that you just write // ai! optimize this at a needed place, press Enter, and wait for AI to autocomplete your work. I live through my last days at school and see classmates using ChatGPT for basic combinatorics and not even knowing/caring about the "Reasoning" toggle just behind their thumbs, which activates o3-mini. In real life, this looks like hailing Uber to get to home at a distance of two crossroads and an alley.
This also creates a gap between those who co-create with AI and those who offload all the heavy lifting onto it. Rapid prototyping, reflection, research, learning, and even creative writing became so, so much better because I don't accept instant solutions and use everything AI through "assume failure" filter. This pushes me to check sources, propose my own ideas, edit text myself, and put every generated token of AI-powered "teacher" agents under scrutiny. Also, Android documentation is hell to sift through without Perplexity. This specific road requires a car.
But I don't forget to ride a bike. For this text, the only AI tools used are Google (it counts technically because of its annoying AI Overviews that no one actually reads due to immense reputational damage they received, with exception for a quick gag) and Gemini to check the pacing and flow of my writing.
Giving in into these tools completely is far from being my thing because I enjoy agency and aware of responsibility. Giving up and rejecting AI outright means lagging behind - aforementioned Perplexity is too good at kickstarting the research, plus AI usage under my curation helps my younger sister develop critical thinking.
And you? Will you choose to hail Uber every time you just need to cross the road? That's up to you.