HALTUNG: On Developing Cultural Intelligence in the Age of AI

We still need critical thinking. Ethical thinking. Systematic thinking. We still need to foster relationships. To build bridges. To coordinate. To orchestrate. These are human things. These are the skills that designers and developers need to cultivate and grow in order to continue to be viable in our AI age.

The first step is to understand the fundamental difference between humans and AIs. We are analog, chemical beings, with emotions and feelings. Compared with machines, we think slowly—and we act too fast, failing to consider the long-term consequences of our behavior (which AI can help predict). So we should not compete with AI; we should use it. At... See more

These findings suggest that a reflective ap-proach toward the use of GenAI tools, which can lead to what prior work refers to as “pathways to non-reliance on AI” [ 20 ], is more likely to occur when knowledge workers have more confidence in doing the task without AI, or in evaluating AI responses. Our qualitative analysis (see Section 4.3) finds th... See more

But you can’t automate the ineffable if you never bothered to access or even define what the ineffable looks like. No algorithm can fetch your “vibe” from ‘Source’, much less train on it, if you don’t have one. Before you can offload discernment, you have to possess some discernment worth offloading.

Although the practical success of neural networks is still undeniable, it must be observed that their most powerful applications are in domains where rules are set in advance and don’t change over time — where the goals are clearly defined. The way you win a game of chess or Go is fixed and unambiguous. Protein folding is constrained by the laws of... See more