Why the Best AI Will Not Replace Thinking — It Will Improve Seeing
The dominant story about advanced AI is that it will think for people — reason through problems, weigh options, arrive at conclusions faster than a human could alone. That story assumes thinking was the scarce resource in the first place, and for most of what actually goes wrong in a life, it wasn't.
Most recurring problems don't fail at the reasoning step. A person facing a familiar situation usually has functioning reasoning available to them; what's missing is an accurate picture of what's actually happening — which pattern is running, what's actually being selected for, what the situation has in common with ten other situations that felt unrelated at the time.
An AI that thinks well on someone's behalf, without improving what they can actually see about their own behavior, replaces a step that was rarely the broken one. An AI that improves what a person can see — surfacing the pattern, the repetition, the thing that's been operating in the background — addresses the step that was actually failing.
The most useful version of AI, for this specific problem, isn't a faster thinker sitting on top of a person's life. It's a clearer set of eyes on it — which is a different capability than reasoning, and the one actually in short supply.
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Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai