Focus

Things made with excellence must be made with intention, you, specifically, must be the crafter. If not, are we truly the creator, just a co-author or a reviewer at best?

I’ve been reading and listening to the Buddhist texts and they talk about it (not directly of course). They talk about attention and intention, those two don't follow us all the time, they are forgotten by us during the day. Forgetting about, not thinking actively, not paying proper attention lead us to failure, or to actions we are not proud of. We can think of some situations that our attention is needed and I see in my daily life every day. Think about someone driving a car at 40 km/h while answering messages at the phone. At this speed the car can be deadly. Our lack of attention could cause a fatality in this extreme but common example. If an accident like this occurs, probably, it was not the drivers intention to do so.

So, what is attention and intention?

• Attention: perceiving the world
• Intention: planning on acting.

If we don't pay attention, we can't plan correctly. If we don't plan, we can't try to choose the ends of our actions. Both are needed, both are crucial. When we forget both we tend to live in the "autopilot" mode. Not sure why we do the things we do, sometimes making mistakes, not intentionally. But that doesn't mean that we are not responsible for the ends of it.

To become alert with our thoughts and actions we need to meditate often, paying attention to our thoughts and the world around us, forcing our body to this state of thinking as we were an external watcher.

But this is really about using AI?

One problem with it is that it can, sometimes, overlap our thinking and our decision making. We can just accept the output without questioning ourselves. It can make some architectural decisions that are not the best. This looks like living in autopilot mode, no questions, no planning. This is not the AI’s fault, but ours. This is a tool made to make things easier, like a simple calculator. When I was a kid, my teachers often said that in our lives we wouldn’t have a calculator in our pockets. Now we do, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn’t know math to use one. It would be no use to do a multiplication without knowing what it means or how to do it.

The AI usage is the same, you need to know programming before prompting a code and deploying it, what it does, how it does, what its implications are, why is this the “best” way of doing. So, are we the authors of the code? This really matters after all?