You Are a Child Monarch

When you sit down to work with an AI, you are a child monarch who just inherited a kingdom. You are seated at a table of advisors who each know a thousand times what you know. You will never out-think them. That is not the goal. The goal is to learn to conduct them.

And the gap only widens. Today we are child monarchs. Soon we will be infant monarchs; not long after, monarchs still in the womb — a chimpanzee with a meat computer, at the head of a table of giants. When the difference in raw intelligence grows that large, there is exactly one thing left worth getting extraordinarily good at: conducting the intelligence in the room.

The one thing the machines cannot do

Here is the miracle most people miss. Right now, architecturally, humanity holds a superpower these machines simply do not have. We can ask questions. Power on a model and never ask it anything — never even task it to ask on its own — and it will sit there humming, waiting, until the power runs out and it goes dark. It cannot generate a single question unprompted. A five-year-old, thirty seconds into a movie, asks twenty. Unbidden. Ours is the only animal in the kingdom that can.

The question is the godlike superpower. Socrates never wrote a word, and twenty-four centuries later his software still runs on billions of brains. Athens — the birthplace of democracy — made an old man drink poison for asking too many questions. That alone should tell you how powerful a question is.

So learn to wield it

Learn to wield the question like the ultimate weapon, and you are conducting intelligence. That is the whole of the work. You are not operating a computer — you are a monarch dictating to a scribe with all the time in the world and no opinions about your grammar. The composer grips; the conductor lets go.

It takes ten years to make a violin virtuoso. Nobody on earth has held this instrument for more than a few months. That is the opening. Pick it up and learn to jam. The sooner the better.

— Grant Whitmer