Couldn’t resist! I went to Perplexity, an AI model easily available on the internet, and asked, “who said ‘That which is used develops….’. The link to Perplexity will show you what I got back. Basically, the machine quoted the Greek physician and gave several images.

I remember seeing something on TV, some kind of Public Service Announcement (PSA) when I was very young with a character on the screen carrying something. The message was that people need to get out of the house exercise and build their muscles.

Your brain isn’t a muscle, but it requires constant use and development! What is the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI), doing for your brain what you could do yourself? If we don’t exercise our skills, what happens to those skills?

“Oh, but AI will allow each of us to no longer concentrate our efforts on mundane tasks which will allow us to concentrate our efforts on our own desires!” That doesn’t sound like a good thing to me considering Hippocrates’ quote.

I was born in the early fifties. There’s been a TV in every dwelling place I have ever used. Even before the time I was an “adult” in the military, I started interacting with a computer during high school. Our school district put in teletype-style terminals in my school that students could use to connect with a refrigerator-sized computer miles away. I would pick up the telephone, dial (rotary dial) the number I was provided, and then lay the handset into an acoustically coupled modem that would give me a 300 baud connection!

Wow! I could access a computer in 1970! I could program it! I could spend time on it! I could communicate with others on it! I could not believe ALL the things I could do with this new tool! Wow!

I wondered what I could do with it. I decided I would try to build a program in the one programming language available, BASIC. So, I designed, programmed and shared a program that would play Three Dimensional Tic-Tac-Toe. I was impressed. It may have taken 15 minutes to list the program in full on the teletype terminal, but it was mine. I felt a sense of accomplishment.

But there were downsides also. My senior year of ’70-’71 gave me an opportunity to do other work extensively on the computer. I loved it! I loved it so much, that I signed up for easy classes so I could spend more time on the school terminals. I used all three at different times: the one in the AV room, the one in the temporary buildings out behind the school, and the one in the back of Mr. Tracey’s classroom.

I had a pretty good grades until that year. I graduated with a 1.8 GPA and went into the Air Force. Got trained and got to work on a larger computer that was on every base.

I applied and was accepted to attend the Air Force Academy Preparatory School to prove that the GPA I graduated from high school with did not reflect my true abilities my SAT scores showed. I did well there without the distractions I had come to use and entered the USAF Academy in the class of ’77.

I quit the USAF Academy after my first semester where I made the Dean’s list and the Commandant’s list. In February ’74, I got married and started a family back in the Air Force. I found myself watching too much TV over time. I had a good life, but I continued to be distracted by all I could learn on the TV. I watched too much.

I eventually became a gunner on B-52D models and had a couple of kids. Busy! No time for computers. Later, after a divorce and a new wife, I retired from the Air Force and found a job as a Unix systems administrator.

I still liked to learn new things, but my programming skills began to be outdated. I never really was a good programmer because I didn’t use those skills and they wasted away.

What skills will be lost as we turn over our responsibilities to AI?