The Death of the Unresolved Debate

When I was a kid, I would ask difficult questions of my dad, and if he didn’t know the answer, he would simply reply, “I don’t know.” No embarrassment. No shame. It was just a small mystery we could get around to solving. Today, of course, I’ve got a pocket slab of dark glass that can instantly summon an artificial intelligence to answer my questions. In less than two seconds, the mystery is gone. But by skipping the delay—the slow, messy process of wondering—we’ve quietly given up something much better: the art of thinking through things together

For example, how far away is the moon? What does dawn chorus mean? Who’s the first president of Iceland? In fact, if I misspell anything, it politely asks me, “Did you mean … ?” and even offers me the polished answer many professors don’t know.

This technology has processed millions of books, thousands of emails, and all of the websites in the entire world. In less than two seconds, you’ll get an incredible answer to your query.

I don’t even think twice. I just accept the answer given to me. For instance, for the question “What does dawn chorus mean?” The answer it gave me was “A Dawn Chorus is when all the birds sing at dawn, when the sun rises, and when it’s still dark”. I further asked it, “ where do wild monkeys live?” Now, I have a geographical breakdown of where wild monkeys can be found all around the world.

I can’t help but find this process a tad elusive. You carry a vast digital library, yet you bypass the effort of searching through it. I find most times, when I need help with something, I will avoid digital help for as long as I can. I don’t fear technology, but I fear the fact that some small sliver of an “algorithm’s” suggestion, or maybe an “algorithm’s” phrasing, may sink into my own writing. Then I would never be certain that it was all me who figured it all out.

In my life and yours, we seldom seek help from one another; today however, answers arrive in a fraction of a second. We often rely on our teachers, books and friends with wisdom. Indeed, human help has texture, an invisible quality of delay and friction but there is something new about the world we live in today. It’s the element of instantaneity.

This shift crept up on me slowly. Life got easier in small, unnoticed ways—like writing an email without ever having to finish a sentence, because predictive text was already doing it for me. I was getting help, sure, but I was also quietly building a dependency I didn't even notice. Making dinner meant relying on a digital voice to take me through all the steps of the recipe, rather than taking a few extra moments to remember what I was supposed to do, or being able to estimate cooking times.

Science fiction didn’t do a great job preparing us to see the world as it is now, in those moments of subtle efficiency. Much of the appeal of what was once the future was in the flashy, theatrical, the instinct in us all to marvel at the new. We weren’t warned that we’d hand off the simple, mechanical choices first, gradually easing into full dependence.

It has me wondering how else me, or we, have been changed and how we think. Do I still really want to spend an hour or so cooking a dinner? I sometimes do, I guess. I’ve even found myself re-learning how to trick myself into going slow while preparing food. I’m compelled to want to save my time.

But what is slightly more alarming is how we interact with one another.

 Lately I’ve found myself avoiding engaging new people in discussions that might lead to an argument. Though, I’m not afraid of confrontation or anything like that, I have just slowly come to realize there is so much conflict over petty things not worth wasting our energy on. Now, I didn’t mind a nice argument with friends over the finer details of a theory about a historical event and even if we disagreed about the facts, that was okay. If only to get together again and laugh about it later over a fresh cold beverage on the porch.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I still enjoy lively discussion but I have found myself more willing to be the one to give up on the debate sooner rather than later. Am I tired of the argument? Do I really care what the correct answer is?

These conversations almost never happen to me anymore in my room. The moment a disagreement over a fact, context, or even the definition of a word arises, I instantly reach for my cellphone. “Let’s just ask the machine,” I’ll tell them. In just two seconds, a screen appears, offering a definitive verdict. The machine has declared who is right and who is wrong.

The argument is over and the mystery solved. A strange silence fills the room. And this is what is actually scary about the machine: it has eliminated one of the messiest, yet most wonderful, aspects of human conversation. Often, we just aren’t ready to have our thinking challenged, our logic put under the spotlight. Sometimes, we want to be deliberately, willfully wrong. To have the chance to explore the other person’s position.

When I decide to skip that entire mental process (because a device has given me the answer ), I am giving up something vital. I don’t believe the machine will ever protect that space for us. Its very purpose is to optimize, to solve, to answer. If we want to preserve the art of thinking for ourselves, we must notice when we are giving it away, and actively defend it.

In this age of information, we have trained ourselves to have an urge to know all things, all at once. For the sake of conversation, though, we would be wise to rein this compulsive thirst in every so often. A fun challenge can be every time you have an urge to look something up while conversing, you argue your case based on information stored in your own brain and experience. If that isn’t enough, give yourself permission that knowing everything is not as great as having a fun, unresolvable debate with those you care about.