On May 12th 1997, The Guardian ran an interesting headline.
“Deep Blue win a giant step for computer kind.”
Although the piece played on Neil Armstrong’s moon landing quote, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” it was a depressing acknowledgement of the defeat of humankind in general after Garry Kasparov was defeated by Deep Blue in a game of chess.
For professional chess players, the defeat marked a significant change in how they would later trained.
“If a computer could out-calculate the greatest player alive, what was left for a human to learn?” they would ask.
Some players figured that to defeat the machine, they would keep using their old playbooks that told them to learn to play like computers and memorize longer opening lines.
They were wrong and lost every time.
Memorizing the answers without understanding the questions looked brilliant until the machine introduced “out-of-book” moves and they had nothing to recall.
However, the players who rose instead, like Magnus Carlsen, were running on a different playbook.
They knew that when the machine could give you free answers to memorize, the real bottleneck shifted to earned understanding.
For many years, your limitation to self-learning was the method and the effort.
You simply couldn’t diversify your skills because it meant many hours of study to hunt for the answers at the expense of what you were already good at.
Today, AI has collapsed the cost to zero. It hands you flawless answers to any field faster than you can even form questions.
However, even when you are AI-augmented, you find that you only have many open learning projects and none is progressing.
There’s nothing wrong with you. You are just referring to the old playbook memorizers ran that tells you to copy the answers, store them, and move on.
Only to face reality and realize that your AI-augmented self-learning approach replaced the learning you required to achieve.
This week, we update our self-learning playbook and learn how to use AI to compound our learning, not replace it.
Let’s get started.