- What's the best way to reheat macaroni cheese without drying it out?
- What is the right balance of yoghurt and cucumber in tzatziki?
Since removing the internet from my phone I've had some alarming moments that show me how often I outsource small queries, reflexively reaching for a browser in moments of mild uncertainty. Yet without it, I work things out myself - apron on, humming away, tasting and seasoning as I go.
After 20 years of cooking for myself and my family, when did I develop this impulse to just quickly look that up? What's that about?
Fear of making the wrong choice is a sensible human impulse. Whether we're reheating a mac'n'cheese, picking a driving route, or making relationship decisions, we've always deferred to wiser people in our lives - parents, teachers, peers, and experts.
Now this impulse is instantly relieved by technology. No matter your question, a bot offers a confident answer. Casserole dish in one hand, question in the other, I smash a quick Google... and with every little check, trust in my own judgement erodes, just a pinch.
I plunged headfirst into the philosophy of judgement for this essay, and I've emerged battered, tired, and with an extended metaphor clutched triumphantly in my fist. Judgement, as far as I can tell, is a bit like a recipe - you've got your ingredients and your method, and both are just as important.
The ingredients are what might come to mind when someone is described as having 'good judgement' - accumulated knowledge, a track record of considered thinking, demonstrated capacity for logic. This includes a mix of objective basics (facts, observations) and subjective spice (felt senses, values and beliefs, moral codes.)
The method is the process we use to form those judgements. The steps we take. The way we think. The sources we consult. Our ability to parse default assumptions from considered opinions. All that good stuff.
A decision, then, is the product of our judgement - the choice or action we land on. Judgement is both butter and sugar; creaming and sifting - decisions are the cake.
The quality of our outputs (decisions) is determined by the quality of our judgement recipe. But here's where the metaphor falls over a bit: following a prewritten recipe won't get you the kind of high-quality judgement you're looking for. For that, you need to experiment, innovate, and develop your personal taste.
You might be thinking: shit, this is a lot of pressure, Alicia. I'm tired, don't hate on me for Googling a tzatziki recipe. I hear you. No shade from me. But I'm interested in what this innocuous little tic is representative of.
I just spent a day immersed in this behemoth report on AI and human agency and I was most struck by the glaring contradiction between what the experts say we need to stay resilient to AI and what the technology is designed to do. The experts say: resilience needs strong judgement, mental flexibility, emotional attunement, relational connection, careful design, et al. The tech says: nah. Pass me your memory and skills. Scroll this reel while I write your emails.
There's 1,000 ways the technology could go, and lots of clever people working to save us from obliteration. Anyone who claims to know where we'll end up is lying, selling something, or both. But in the meantime, the same technology that decimated our attention spans is worming its way into our brains and undermining trust in our own skills and ideas. I wrote about this a couple of months ago - the most common uses of AI tools aren't the world-saving or admin-slashing stuff, it's decision support. Help me work this out, tell me what to do, do my thinking for me type stuff.
There's an obvious issue that comes when we decouple our outputs (decisions) from the process we use to make them (judgement). In the short-term, it all seems fine. Why sweat over the oven at home, when you can pick up a Woolies mud cake on the way to the meeting?
Fact is, you can Google your way to a life plan or write a compelling business case with AI. This is great - until you need to connect with other people about it, or answer questions about the process you used to get there. Then, when things change and you need to adapt your clever document to the new conditions... you're toast. You can't even remember what's in it because you didn't make it. Back to the bot you go.
Unless we know why and how we make our choices, we can't learn or change course. Was it too much salt? Not enough time under the grill? Did we mix the batter too long? If we aren't connected to the steps, it's hard to evaluate what went wrong, or what to do next time.
To pull from my work-experience box for a minute, strategic planning is a great example of using our judgement to make us resilient for the future. Done well (strong caveat on this one), strategic planning is a contested, collaborative process where we decide how to decide. Plans have actions in them, but strategies have criteria. When we land on these principles (or values, or pillars, or key focus areas, or whatever the fashion of the day is) we can point all our people and money in the same direction: toward our desired future.
This is wildly useful. Instead of arguing over which projects to green light, we agree the criteria for all projects ahead of time, then apply them as we go. This means decision-makers can speed up and delegate every-day judgement calls, with the confidence that short-term choices are aligned with long-term goals. It also pays dividends over time, as new threats and opportunities emerge. Doing the big-picture work keeps us nimble, helping people make choices in uncertainty without starting from scratch.
Of course, like anything that involves friction and manual, iterative steps, it can feel slow and even frustrating at the time. Who wants to do a new strategy? The workshops. The post it notes. The away days. The drafts for consultation. Bla di ba di bla. But over the long-term, when something major happens and we don't throw the whole document in the bin, it pays off.
Like judgement, strategic planning is an act of metacognition. Decision-makers think about their thinking and actively design a process and framework to make choices in. They write the recipe, rather than just describing a nice cake or writing a shopping list. This is more demanding and abstract than rolling up your sleeves and getting into the kitchen, which is why it's so hard to pull off. It's also why the people and organisations who are good at it have such a strategic advantage.
Without these skills - capacity for change and independent thought - we become brittle and fragile. You don't need to run an organisation for this to be true. If you're a person, living a life, you deserve agency over who you are, what you think, and where you're going next. You deserve to own your thoughts, your choices, and your consequences.
If we outsource our thinking, our judgement, the stuff that makes us human, we risk that agency. Tracey Follows, in her work on identity and technology, distinguishes between the 'machinable' and 'unmachinable' self.
"The ‘machinable’ consists of everything about a person that can be rendered legible to systems: data, preferences, behavioural patterns, credentials, biometric signals, productivity metrics, risk scores. These elements are increasingly required for participation in society. Identity itself has become infrastructural. Without being machine-readable, individuals cannot access finance, services, mobility or even civic rights.
The ‘unmachinable,’ by contrast, consists of those human capacities that cannot be fully captured or automated: judgment, meaning-making, ethical reasoning, imagination, intuition, timing and the ability to change oneself in response to context. These are not sentimental attributes. They are the basis of agency. As systems become more predictive and automated the unmachinable becomes the primary site of human resilience."
Regardless of the technology, economy, or environment, it is our unmachinable self who participates in our lives, relationships, and communities. It is our unmachinable self who makes courageous choices that put values like fairness, freedom, or integrity ahead of speed and convenience. Who thinks long-term about the life, society, or community they want, and the sacrifices they'll make to get there. Who decides how they want to live, love and lead.
The techno-optimists insist this will all be taken care of, in due time. You're just not using it right. We'll design for all that. AI will make us better thinkers. Maybe so. Humans are remarkably resilient and there is no technology we've failed to adapt to yet. But the "just trust the tech-bros, don't ask questions because you might fall behind" approach isn't going great for us so far.
At this moment in history, there are powerful interests designing systems that undermine our will and ability to think clearly, join the dots, and trust ourselves and others. We might ask ourselves why that is.
My 16 year old daughter had her first driving lesson last week and arrived home uncharacteristically quiet. She was staggered by how many things she had to do and remember at once - checking her mirrors, identifying hazards, and making split-second choices, not to mention driving the bloody car. She was nervous about what would happen if she made a mistake. "How does anyone drive?!" she asked, in baffled wonderment.
It was a useful reminder - learning to drive is hard! I remember that same overwhelmed feeling. I assumed I'd get in the car and be straight onto gravel road snakies, but it took me ages just to let the clutch out properly. I shared this with Charlie (leaving out the bit about the snakies) to reassure her that driving becomes so much easier and more natural with practice.
Most of the conscious, stressful things shift into autopilot and muscle memory. You can't learn to drive in theory. It takes hours on the road, and every skill - turning, parking, reversing - builds on the one before it. You become confident enough to leave the carpark, then drive on the motorway, and eventually, you may even find yourself cruising on the other side of the road in a foreign country. (Or in my case, rolling a cigarette, changing gear, tooting my horn and pulling the finger all at the same time. Ah, youth.)
ChatGPT might be able to pass your learners' license test, but the only way to become a confident driver is to practice in a safe environment until the skills become second nature. Like most of the things that matter most in our lives - health, relationships, creative fulfilment - driving is an embodied practice as much as a mental one. We need our unmachinable self to take charge of the machine.
Developing judgement is a similar vibe. It's not easy, that's for sure. All those high-energy steps - reading widely, synthesising information, interrogating values, making connections, recognising patterns, considering second-order effects, engaging in challenge and reflection - are hard-going at first. Like strategic planning, they feel like a frustrating waste of time - until they don't. With practice, we relax and trust ourselves more. We see things clearly and ask better questions. We form careful opinions. We make good choices. We become a thinker and person we're proud of.
There's no shortcut to trusting our judgement - few things that really matter can be automated. But there are plenty of practical ways to resist the pull of convenience. The first and most obvious of which is probably to wean yourself off the Internet drip (soz). Then, with your suddenly empty hands and alarmingly free time, you might like to pick up a pen, and get ready to try some shit.
Developing a reflective practice builds metacognition. When we take notes on things we read, in our own words, and share our thoughts with others, we understand them better, save them in our long-term memory, and pull them out to make interesting connections later on.
Consider a handwritten journal - the most classic and useful practice of any independent thinker. In your journal, your thoughts and experiences become objects of study, and you, as journaller, the analyst and observer.
On a lighter note - what happens when you trust yourself to cook without the recipe, make your own running schedule, and do your own budget? We survived for generations doing this ourselves. Use a pen. Think about it. Talk to people. Risk messing up. Every step toward self-trust builds on the one before it.
I'm not suggesting you become a total Luddite: where would we be without our trusty tools? Our cake mixers, our air fryers, our dishwashers?
(Mind you, none of our kitchen appliances threaten to cull thousands of jobs. Your toaster isn't replacing your romantic relationships, your kettle hasn't interfered with any elections and your microwave isn't replacing your kids' education. So there's that.)
You're a bright button, and you know how to use things to your advantage. Lots of those tools do useful things that make your life easier without rotting your brain.
But it's worth asking some questions: What do we lose when we can't cook for ourselves? What do we risk when we lose control over our thought diet? Who benefits when we're force-fed bullshit for so long we can't even spot anymore?
You can live entirely on processed food, if you like. But don't call yourself a chef. And don't be surprised when your health goes to shit.
Til next week,
AM
- The trick with macaroni cheese is to coat the pasta in butter before you mix it in the sauce. The fat limits extra liquid absorption in the oven and locks in moisture for when you reheat it.
- One (grated, throughly squeezed out) cucumber per cup of Greek yoghurt is about right. Add lemon juice, salt, dill and garlic to taste. My taste: many, many garlics.
- The Tracey Follows quote is from an essay she contributed to this 378 page report by Imagining Digital Futures: "Building a Human Resilience Infrastructure for the Age of AI."
- I abandoned my usual practice of snappy subtitles for this one because they got in the way of my thought flow. As a regular reader - how did you find that? Absorbing, or a pain the ass? Honest feedback appreciated.
