What AI Gives Back
I took typing in high school. That would hardly seem worth remembering except that I was a young woman headed into engineering at a time when typing still carried the distinct aroma of secretarial work. It was something women learned because women became secretaries. I had no intention of becoming a secretary, but I knew I would have papers to write, so I took the class. Thank God I did.
I learned on a manual typewriter. Later, one of the attractions of the young man who became my husband was that he had an electric typewriter. Imagine that. You could type faster. Then came word processors, personal computers, the internet, and now artificial intelligence. Almost every machine for which I supposedly learned the skill has disappeared, yet the skill itself survived. Nearly fifty years later I still use it every day. Formation prepares us not merely for the world that exists, but for a world we cannot yet see.
That typing class also points to something easily overlooked in our discussions of artificial intelligence. Technology has always had something to do with time. The electric typewriter saved time. The word processor saved more. Search engines changed the time required to locate information. Voice input changed the mechanics again. AI can collapse tasks that once consumed hours into minutes. Time matters because it is our limiter. We continuously spend it, and here in this life we cannot replenish it.
I see this clearly in my own writing. I was trained to gather before I wrote. Read widely. Mark the book. Make the note. Follow the footnote. Put the idea on the card. Arrange the cards. Find the gap. Go back and search again. Only after gathering enough material did the writing begin. I still work that way. What has changed is the mechanics. Now I can read with a microphone beside me. An idea occurs, I say it, AI captures it, and I keep reading. I can follow connections without stopping for twenty minutes to construct and file notes. The discipline of gathering has not disappeared. In some ways I gather more richly because less of my finite time is consumed by the mechanics surrounding the thought.
That does not mean AI gives us leisure. It means AI can give us capacity. If a tool saves me two hours, I may not sit under a tree for those two hours contemplating the heavens. I may do four more hours’ worth of work. That is certainly what I see happening in my own life, and I see it in younger adults as well. The old fear that automation would leave human beings with nothing to do looks almost comic from where I sit. Many people using AI well have more serious work available to them than they know how to accomplish. The technology may return time, but it does not tell us what that time is for.
Josef Pieper understood the danger of confusing leisure with merely having time left over. In Leisure: The Basis of Culture, he argues against a world in which the human person is swallowed by what he called the world of total work. Leisure is not simply recovery so that we can work harder tomorrow, and it is not merely unused time. It is an attitude of mind and a condition of the soul: receptivity, contemplation, celebration, and ultimately worship.¹ So the question is not simply how many minutes AI can save me. The question is what is worthy of those minutes. Sometimes the answer is more work. Sometimes it is reading. Sometimes prayer. Sometimes family, conversation, recreation, or the sort of leisure Pieper understood as necessary to a genuinely human culture. “Seek first the kingdom of God” remains the ordering principle.² The technology creates capacity. It does not tell me how that capacity ought to be used.
The amplification can also move through more than one person. I have watched a robotic vacuum clean the floors while AI helped prepare printed materials and I used the resulting time for entirely different responsibilities. AI has helped me enter unfamiliar subjects more rapidly, prepare better questions, and communicate more clearly with professionals whose expertise I need. Good preparation on my side can save time on theirs, leaving their expertise to be directed toward the work only they can properly do. In that way, technology can amplify a chain of human capabilities. Of course, that does not mean every link in the chain is automatically good. The saved time may simply be captured as more work, and greater capability may become greater distraction. Amplification does not supply its own ordering, but it does create possibilities that did not exist before.
There is another kind of formation happening at the same time. Recently I sent my daughter a delightful image of an orange tabby cat surrounded by fall leaves. Her immediate response was, “What prompt did you use?” The funny part was that I had not used one. It was simply a screenshot from my X feed. Her question stayed with me because she knows AI very well. She understood instinctively that the human interaction upstream of an AI-generated result matters. What did you ask? What context did you give it? How did you refine the result? There is using AI, and then there is learning how to use AI well. A professional writer friend of mine put it another way: it is one thing for AI to write, and another thing for AI to write well.
I have had many people ask me, “Can you teach me how to do AI?” That is a real question because there are skills involved. You learn to ask better questions, supply sufficient context, challenge an answer, request contrary evidence, check sources, recognize sycophancy, recognize when a thought has been flattened, and, every so often, recognize that the machine has simply gone sideways. You also have to know when to stop prompting and think. None of this replaces the formation I wrote about in Part I. Technique cannot supply the standard by which the result is judged. But formation and AI competence can begin to work reciprocally. Prior formation allows the tool to be used more intelligently. Intelligent use increases capability, and that increased capability can create opportunities for more reading, more learning, deeper investigation, and further formation. It can, though we cannot assume that it will.
That is one reason I am uneasy with a purely Luddite response to artificial intelligence. There may be excellent reasons to limit AI during particular stages of education. A child developing foundational habits is not in the same position as a formed adult learning to use a consequential new tool. Indefinite nonuse also carries a cost. AI competence develops through use, the tools continue to change, and professional expectations change with them. Someone who decides today that AI is simply one technological innovation too many may discover several years from now that the learning curve has become much steeper.
That does not mean everyone must use AI for everything, and it certainly does not mean every refusal is foolish. Prudence may require limits. Particular vocations may require different limits. Parents and educators may rightly protect spaces in which attention, memory, reading, conversation, and independent work can develop without a machine constantly present. But nonuse is not necessarily a neutral choice either.
We once taught practical skills because we understood that human beings needed to know how to use the tools of their time. I am very glad someone taught a future engineer to type, even though neither of us could possibly have imagined the machines on which she would eventually use that skill. Now another tool has arrived. Formation makes responsible AI use possible, and responsible AI use, properly ordered, can in turn make further formation possible. The machine can give us more reach, more speed, more access, and sometimes more time. What happens next remains profoundly human. The question is not merely how much time AI can save us. It is what kind of people we will become with the time and capability it gives back.
Endnotes
- Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, trans. Alexander Dru (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009). Pieper’s contrast is with the world of total work, not with work as such. Leisure, in his account, is an attitude of mind and a condition of the soul, ordered ultimately toward worship and the receptive apprehension of reality, not leftover minutes after productivity has been maximized.
- Matthew 6:33 (New American Bible, Revised Edition). The same ordering principle governs Part I.