Why You Need to be Unskilled

Fred Tomaselli

Some things I excel at. I can write and dance and make excellent phone calls. At other tasks, I am a failure. I cannot do math in my head, and I cannot stay calm in an emergency. It's the same with every other person on this earth. Moses himself was a terrible public speaker, yet had incredibly important faith and relationship with God. Each of us has strengths, and each has weaknesses. 

In the modern day and age, there is a trend toward desiring perfection. On the one hand, if Christ is our Lord and Savior, we should aim to be like Him. For many people, however, Christ is not the standard of perfection they strive for. 

In the past, to become good at something, one had to put in days, even years of effort. Even to cheat in school, one had to do some digging and develop skills. Nowadays, with the ongoing development of Generative AI, anyone can contrive an end product that mimics the appearance of something made through diligent human labor. We are creating for ourselves a modern Tower of Babel, and imagining that with it we can rise above our own inabilities. With AI, people don't need to learn to draw in order to achieve a picture of whatever they want. They don't even need to learn to use Photoshop. With AI, people don't need to practice expelling their thoughts onto paper or a keyboard in order to express themselves fully. They can simply type the raw, unfleshed idea and receive a finalized draft while skipping the entire process of learning and thinking through writing and expression. With AI, people don't need to painstakingly stretch their fingers in an attempt to play a foreign guitar chord. They can simply ask the machine to create a song. 

To some, this might sound like a good thing. It might appear fantastic to witness the supreme ease which has been bestowed upon us. In reality, however, something terrible is taking place. 

"There is no need to outsource my humanity when the inventor of intelligence--for whom AI's future developmental crescendo will be as impressive as an abacus--became human himself." 
- Matthew J. Milliner's "The Perfect Mirror"

The reality of being human is this: we are flawed. We are not meant to be good at everything. Even Jesus, perfect in every aspect of character and spirit, spent years cultivating the skills of carpentry. We are meant to learn things, to develop skills we do not have yet. We are meant to stumble before we can walk, and to scribble before we can draw. We are meant to let out cacophonous wailing before we discover how to harness music. We are meant to learn more about ourselves and the discipline we engage with through the very process of becoming more skilled. Through reading, we are meant to reflect upon the nature of the characters we engage with, thus inviting us to inquire of ourselves and the world around us. Through writing, we are meant to draw from the depths of our mind a tangled thread of ideas, wind it neatly, and weave it for others to see. By learning, we grow to understand. 

Perhaps even more importantly, while many disciplines can be learned, we are not all meant to be experts in every wheelhouse. I can dance, but I am not Misty Copeland. I can write, but I am not Mary Oliver or Franz Kafka. A high schooler who loves to paint may never paint like Van Gogh, and that is as it should be. We are not meant to be professionals in every domain. We are meant to dabble, perhaps, but not to be talented in every realm. 

"Maybe precisely because we have different gifts and passions, God calls us together to build each other up." - Bill Davis's In All Things Christ Preeminent.

Humans are not meant to be solitary creatures. We are meant to be in community, and much of that community stems from dependence. If we are good at everything, or even if we pretend we are good at everything by extorting the talents of others through scraping the internet, we will struggle to depend on other people, and will wonder why we feel so lonely. We are meant to request favors from our friends who pursue graphic design, and to bring cupcakes to the birthday of the friend who cannot bake. We are meant to fill one another's gaps, to work together to bridge our inabilities by rejoicing in the gifts of others. 

It is appealing to believe we can do all things in our own strength, simply by harnessing a modern tool. There is, however, much to gain in being bad at things. Through the struggle to learn, we learn more about ourselves, build skills we did not know we lacked, and maintain relationships with those around us. All of those, I believe, are worth sacrificing the convenience of AI.

"It is an act of human defiance to be there for each other anyway, to continue to fill the spaces the machines would all too willingly fill in our absence." - Matthew J. Milliner's "The Perfect Mirror"