The One Thing I Use AI For That Actually Makes Me Smarter

Nobody’s doing this

Hey there, I’m Alberto! 👋 Each week, I publish long-form AI analysis covering culture, philosophy, and business for The Algorithmic Bridge. Paid subscribers also get Monday news commentary and Friday how-to guides. I publish occasional extra articles. If you’d like to become a paid subscriber, here’s a button for that:

This guide is a little… different than usual. It’s more “me,” you could say. More real and more useful than any other guide I’ve written. But also way more “me.”

WRITER: I’ve started using AI to argue against my own ideas before I commit to them. I find this practice both encouraging and humbling.

SOCRATES: Do you find it useful as well?

WRITER: Extremely. It’s like having a sparring partner available at any hour. The only problem is that it can hit too softly or too hard if you don’t give precise instructions.

SOCRATES: I see a bigger problem: the machine doesn’t know anything. It has no soul, and thus no virtue, and virtue is the source of conviction, intention, and direction. And if that’s the case, and I’m not mistaken, how can arguing with it sharpen your thinking?

WRITER: You got it backward, dear Socrates, that’s why it works: Unlike humans, AI doesn’t need to believe the counterargument to generate it. You can’t escape an idea when no one is wielding it against you. It’s just there, floating between the clouds, oblivious to any ad hominem attacks I might throw at it.

SOCRATES: So you think that an argument without belief to back it up has intrinsic value? How would democracy stand on its own if the people didn’t believe it was the best way to rule a city? If they proposed it without trusting its superiority to a kingdom or empire? How much would the “power of the people” last if the people didn’t wield it against their enemies?

WRITER: As much as it deserved. I mean, an argument is either strong or weak on its own merits and never more than that except by artifice or lie or confusion. It’s either valid or not; either sound or not sound. Whether the person delivering it believes it seems to me irrelevant. Here’s a counter to your counter: if you found an aphorism engraved in stone that presented itself to the wise as an undeniable truth like, say, “Character is fate” or “Life is short, art is long,” and you realized that it had been actually created haphazardly by some miracle of nature—like the erosion that wind and rain impose onto the unwitting rock—instead of teleologically carved by the hand of man, would you deem it less valuable? Would you deem it less truthful?

SOCRATES: Oh, but your premise is too far-fetched to take seriously: when wind and rain manage to write down such an utterance, I will reconsider my position. For now, I can only go with my experience, and it reveals a different reality: when I argued with the Athenians, I didn’t simply generate standalone objections or disembodied questions; I searched for truth alongside them. Democracy emerged from the forum not the ground; democracy is nothing without its people, an anachronism. Human pursuits are always embedded in a historical context and a human context. An argument without context or belief is like a necklace without a neck; it has nothing to hold on to.

WRITER: The neckless machine has an advantage, though: I can’t punish it for showing me I’m wrong. It’s free from the tyranny of a bunch of envious judges who consider enlightenment a crime. There’s nothing to kill; no head to sever without a neck; no throat to swallow the hemlock without a neck.

SOCRATES: Would you punish a human interlocutor for showing you the truth?

WRITER: Not punish but resent. I can’t prevent attacks to my ego; it’s fragile and its knee jerk reactions, unpredictable. I could assume your objection as motivated by jealousy or politics, or moral rot—and act accordingly. With the machine, there’s no motive to attribute; I can evaluate things without evaluating the source. I would never say: the machine is corrupting the kids! No, the kids are self-corrupting, if anything. I reiterate: An ego-less intelligent being is the best possible sparring partner. How can you deny this—you died for it!

SOCRATES: I was murdered, and now I live forever; little cost to pay for immortality. Whether I died one day sooner or later is of no importance; the fact that I died virtuous, however, matters supremely. I chose to be principled; I chose virtue. I chose goodness. The machine, in turn, can’t be any of those things. It can’t be principled or virtuous or good, for it’s not good he who refrains from evil out of impotence, but rather he who refrains from evil out of choice.

WRITER: It’s good he who is good.

SOCRATES: Don’t you find it troubling that you’re practicing the examined life with something that can examine but not live?

WRITER: Isn’t the modern man living without examination? You tell me which is worse.

SOCRATES: You’re cleverer than my usual interlocutors. They at least have the decency to contradict themselves. I don’t see what the machine can contribute to your growth if you are this skilled. Aren’t you just lazy?

WRITER: Maybe my offloading parts of my mind into it has scaffolded me into superior greatness. Maybe it was the machine that taught me consistency and wisdom.

SOCRATES: I find it hard to believe that a machine whose main characteristic is to unreliably predict the next word would teach you anything but unreliable predictability. Unreliability is the enemy of consistency, and predictability is the enemy of wisdom.

WRITER: But I don’t use it to generate my ideas. There’s a difference between asking “what should I think?” and asking “what’s wrong with what I think?” You keep making a fatal mistake: you are thinking about the machine from a human-centered lens, which leads you to make assumptions you should not make, which you would not make if you bothered coming down from your pedestal and try it by yourself. For example, the machine can be abnormally adept at doing analysis and abnormally inept at executing according to that analysis. Its literary genius is reduced to that of the critic; it could never write a half decent poem but knows why the good ones are good.

SOCRATES: So you’re telling me that you were not that good at arguing and so arguing with the machine taught you to argue better but not because the machine itself was a better arguer but because it trained you by showing your flaws and then you changed your ways?

WRITER: Yep.

SOCRATES: If that’s the case then the quality of the machine’s reasoning is irrelevant! Any sufficiently unexpected objection would have served the same purpose. You may as well be arguing against a rock and allow its silence do the work for your arguments. Or against a mountain; can your word resist itself?

WRITER: It wouldn’t work because my task is to interrogate the machine’s reasoning back against it. I won’t accept any counter without first assessing its worth. I can’t allow the machine to wield its alien powers against me, for it will never set foot on this Earth and yet it could convincingly argue that apples are usually multicolored and spiky or that Spain doesn’t exist. Maybe that’s its fundamental strength: it’s not constrained by reality. That’s how I get better! By arguing that Spain exists!

SOCRATES: When you say “Spain exists,” I must ask: exists as what? Not as land, for the land was there long before people called it Spain, and will remain long after the name is forgotten. Not as a people, for the Visigoths gave way to the Moors who gave way to the Christians who now quarrel among themselves over whether Catalonia belongs to the whole. Not as a government, for it has been caliphate and kingdom and empire and dictatorship and democracy, which is to say it has been its own opposite so many times that no single form can claim the title. What you call Spain is a word in search of a thing. Spain is merely a persistent illusion.

WRITER: If Spain doesn’t exist because its borders shift, its people change, its language adds and removes words, and its government falls and raises again, then nothing exists. Not Spain but also not Athens; not that rock into which rain and wind engraved wise words that wind and rain will eventually erode; not that mountain echoing my arguments that will become valley before long. Not our sun or our moon, changing shape, color, and position in an asynchronous cosmic dance. Not me, and not you, my dear Socrates. You are not the same person you were at birth: different cells, beliefs, name; a soldier, then a stonemason, then a philosopher, then a corpse. You, me, Spain, a river into which you step twice, and everything else are incarnations of Theseus’s ship: Persistence through mutability is not the absence of identity but its definition. Nothing real is fixed; nothing fixed is real.

SOCRATES: Don’t you realize that if you judge the output to improve that means you need a standard of judgment that exists prior to and independent of the machine? Where did that standard come from? You generate the idea, the machine attacks it, and then you judge whether the attack has merit. You are the prosecutor, the machine is a witness, but you are also the judge. You are using scaffolding you don’t need! The machine is redundant!

WRITER: No. That’s like saying a man who can recognize a good chess move when he sees one can therefore find it on his own. Evaluation and generation are different faculties. I can judge an objection perfectly and still never think of it unprompted. The machine opens my mind in ways I could not open it myself. I have discovered truths through it neither of us knew.

SOCRATES: Can you give me an example?

WRITER: For instance, when you said above: “Oh, but your premise is too far-fetched to take seriously: when wind and rain manage to write down such an utterance, I will reconsider my position.” I found that a good line of argument. You forced me to return to the real world because arguing about magic is unfruitful. I don’t think I could have generated that counterargument myself. I thought I was right but I was unable to see all the ways I could have been wrong. I thank you for that.

SOCRATES: Why am I your example?

WRITER: I’ve come out smarter from this exchange despite—or perhaps because of—your constant pushing back, which is itself the very proof I’m defending.

SOCRATES: …

WRITER: …

SOCRATES: So it seems that I could not win. My excellence was, after all, my undoing. I’m content to realize that the only one who could defeat me in an argument was, after all, myself. Well played, Alberto.

The School of Athens by Raphael, 1509-1511