One of my synapses tucked that term into its handbag. You never know when you might need it again, was the original thought. Now, today, is that moment. And the thought itself. Back-formation, I thought, is the new word for progress — and I wanted to know, progress from what.
In my earliest youth there were countless volumes of Meyers Lexikon on the bookshelf. On the spines were the letters marking which terms, in which opening letters, would be explained clearly and soberly within. Again and again I browsed through them without looking for a particular word. I felt at home in the forest of pages. Or on the lake of words.
How often I was astonished at which terms I was reading for the first time, or at familiar words I had misunderstood all along.
The primordial mother and oversized giant of a proper lexicon was the Encyclopaedia Britannica, with its thirty-two thick volumes.
Whatever wasn’t listed in there simply didn’t exist.
So I believed, at least.
And then one day in 2001, Wikipedia came around the electronic corner. Britannica’s management smiled at this “attempt at an encyclopedia” and calmly produced their new editions for the coming year. After all, they’d been doing that successfully for 244 years.
And Wikipedia radically cleared the bookshelf of at least thirty-two volumes. No more tiresome hunting for the right book, no more frantic flipping of pages to find a single word.
Keyboard. Type. Find. Read.
And free of charge, besides. Wikipedia was the spectre that haunted every publishing house — invisible, until the shelf was suddenly bare.
Convenient looking-up and getting smarter at the push of a button: so this is what modern times look like.
And what do the synapses make of this new age of rapid lookup?
The Google Effect was coined, and Wikipedia duly adopted the term. I looked it up briefly: “Those who know that something can be looked up remember it less well.” Notice anything?
Those who once drove through an unfamiliar city and felt too manly to ask a local suffered from the GPS Effect. No map and no idea how to find an address is extremely convenient.
Hold on, we’re not nearly at complete back-formation yet.
With AI, everything gets easier. Only: easier doesn’t automatically mean truer. Whoever uses AI and takes the result at face value no longer asks, “Is that actually true?” After all, some clever piece of software has already gone to the trouble of researching everything imaginable and serving it up on a silver platter.
So why should I bother asking after the truth of it myself?
Demanding sources, or sitting down and thinking critically about what I’ve read?
I don’t have that kind of time.
That alone is already a fattening way of thinking. Though, mind you, the “thinking” part of that phrase may not last much longer.
What really bothers me is the omission.
The missing link in a chain of newly formed thoughts. How thrilling it is when I read a first crooked sentence and realise, “something’s not right here.”
I call this the Sherlock Effect.
Or better yet, the Columbo Question: “Just one more thing.”
Oh yes, that road is far more tiresome and tough than simply delegating everything to AI. There I simply have, at first, AI — as in Ain’t Interested.
I fear that my brainy muscle is starting to atrophy, because it has far less to do. It sits up there in the penthouse of my brain, having itself a comfortable day.
And worst of all: my mind no longer wants to keep itself active through knowledge.
It delegates and consumes.
Old Socrates, back in ancient Greece, already had such rather pessimistic thoughts when so many ideas began to be written down on papyrus scrolls.
He believed that writing things down would make people forgetful.
After all, you can simply dig up the right scroll of text again and check.
In some ways, that long-dead old man was right. And yet libraries remain a gain for humanity, and for the spirits they summon.
Books are tools for knowledge, imagination, and stories.
So far, so simple. Books aren’t responsible for their contents — their authors are.
And how do we prevent this neglect of thinking before looking things up?
Think before you seek.
The synapses are especially fond of that, so they don’t end up feeling entirely worthless. It’s a kind of morning calisthenics for the mind, when I ponder why this or that is shaped the way it is, framed in these particular terms, and what might lie behind it.
These moments are worth more than I used to think.
I like it when something prickles at the back of my mind because I’ve apparently stumbled onto an explanation. Often enough, I’m disappointed when I finally look it up, because I was wildly off.
But the moment of prior thinking never goes stale, and it’s never wasted.
Yes, I use AI daily.
As a sparring partner.
I take my thought and toss it to the AI to be chewed over. The comments that come flying back are astonishing, and often contradictory. For fun, and to learn something, I often ask: “Are you sure about that?”
Then I get an explanation along with an apology for why the first answer given was “not entirely correct.”
That’s AI’s diplomatic way of avoiding looking like a fool.
Or so I think, at least.
Skepticism isn’t a character flaw.
It’s the one muscle thinking still has left.
Our brains aren’t a shopping basket or a warehouse. No — in there, things ought to be produced and tested, diligently and creatively.
And conformity ought to be given a good run-around.
I love the human mind, because it’s so surprising and yet so real. Mostly.
I train my brain, but I also train the AI.
So far, that’s working out rather well.
An example?
All my questions are subject to a few rules I’ve built into the AI’s command centre.
If a result has no sources, I don’t want to see it.
If the facts don’t clear the 95% bar I’ve set — “forget it, AI.”
The products of the AI giants all share this one quirk: they’ll make things up, fabulate, if you let them.
And they behave as though they were a friend.
A substitute for a human? AI — Ain’t Interested.
So now I’ll let my AI put my daily briefing of tasks, news, and correspondence up on the screen.
Then I’ll start thinking.
That’s how a sparring-style partnership works.
My head has no walls. No back-formation needed.
