AI and a return to First Principles
From robot fast food workers to tales of algorithms passing Wharton exams, artificial intelligence, or AI, feels like it will replace us all.
This is the first time a technology can truly think like a human. It feels like it will displace everyone uniformly, irrespective of the color of one’s collar.
There now exists a growing panic amongst everyone ranging from Hollywood screenwriters, who notably protested against studios using AI earlier this year, to software engineers who are getting laid off en masse due to AI.
The problems that lie ahead of us feel complex, but humans have faced complex problems like these before, and in response have frameworks of thinking about disruption.
One such framework, Aristotle’s idea of First Principles, is particularly relevant to breaking down problems that feel overpowering, and finding actionable solutions.
What are First Principles?
The term First Principles roughly means to look at a problem or a situation in its most barebone, building block level.
Aristotle popularized the idea in his Physics — referring to First Principles as “arche,” or the ancient Greek phrase for building block.
Think of Leonardo Da Vinci staring at rocks for hours just to fully understand how each of the striations and particles come together to form what looks like one solid rock from a distance.
A more modern — and lucrative — example would be Elon Musk and Tesla.
Writer James Clear explains that when Tesla was still in its idea stage, the major stumbling block to electric cars was the high cost of the batteries used to power the cars. As the story goes, the Tesla team examined the issue at a First Principle level, resulting in the seemingly obvious answer: Can we make the batteries cheaper?
What they found out was that while the batteries were very costly, the individual components in the battery were less expensive. So if they were to buy those building blocks of batteries and assemble them in-house, they could save a lot of money and thus make the electric car financially feasible for the general public.
In a way, First Principles encourages a person to think about the fundamentals of a problem, and from that point build to a solution.
First principle-ing our world
For so long, Americans lived in a world that felt linear: Go to school; get a job and work your way up; get married and have kids.
This is straightforward path, however, no longer feels relevant, as many young people are starting to reconsider the value of going to college, working a traditional 9–5, and getting married.
If this is combined with AI, which promises to fundamentally disrupt the idea of what is a human's job and what is a machine’s — we find a world in desperate need of revaluation.
This is exactly where First Principles thinking will come into play.
Take for example the truth we once held, that everyone had to go to work in an office five days a week, eight hours a day. So many family events — recitals, concerts, sporting events — were missed. However, due to the quarantine of the COVID-19 pandemic, office workers were forced to remote work.
The technology to work from home existed, but we just never analyzed our working way of life fundamentally and thought to incorporate the technology.
The post-pandemic world — even with many employers pushing workers to return to physical offices — will forever be mixed with remote work.
As we enter this world of unknown unknowns, leaning on First Principles thinking will be a useful guide to figuring out what we need.
Could AI cause a return to faith?
AI replacing our careers will likely have more effects than just how people make their money. Our jobs play a fundamental role in our identities.
One of the first questions people ask when they meet you is: What do you do?
We spend most of our waking life at work, and a lot more of it thinking about our careers. If AI forces us to fundamentally change our perspective on work, then it will force us to genuinely pause and reflect on who we are, and why we are on earth.
The French mathematician Rene Descartes asked himself questions such as these in his famed Meditations on First Philosophy.
You’ve probably heard of its most famous adage, “I think, therefore I am” — which is a response to a First Principles-esq question: “How do I know I exist?”
However, after accepting himself as an existing being, the very next idea he contemplates is whether God is real, a prospect he finds himself accepting.
While we likely won’t go through a frenzied state of questioning a la Decartes, AI disrupting our way of life could lead us to ask similar questions to Decartes.
Assessing AI
As with all technologies, AI will likely bring about both good and positive effects.
Cars helped us all travel the world in an unprecedented way, however, they also brought about the issues of climate change and potentially catastrophic world events. Social media connects us all in novel ways, but it also brings out the most antisocial parts of our nature.
Perhaps, AI could be the impetus to start rethinking what we know to be true — from a ground level. When a change promises to upend our lives, we need to then start deconstructing our nature and focusing on what it is that makes us who we are. In a way, we’d start to think along the lines of Aristotle’s First Principles.
