Your Brain is Bigger Than a Dinosaur's

Track 3: Rawr! 🦖

There’s a scene in the OG Jurassic Park movie where the mathematics chaotician Ian Malcome played by Jeff Goldblum explains why the park is doomed to fail.

If I may... Um, I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here, it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now [bangs on the table]...your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they should.

This is where AI stands today.

As much as I use AI as a thinking partner, researcher, and summarizer (is that even a word?!), I’m not a huge fan of using it for content. Four years into ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, etc. we can tell when someone is posting AI slop.

If you don’t want to make the effort to give me YOUR original thoughts and use a machine to generate generic ideas, why should I read them?

Where AI shines is as a tool builder. Automating repetitive tasks. Summarizing long form content. Troubleshooting workflows. Recognizing patterns. Closing skills gaps.

The last one is tricky. I recently took a vibecoding class, and I’m still absorbing what to do with it all. I see the potential…create skills, build/borrow databases of knowledge, and deploy agents to do tasks. Oh, the potential!!! I’m determined to master this new skillset, and I’m confident I can. I’m a systems girlie, and when this all clicks, watch out!

The thing I see that makes me concerned and frankly kind of irritated is the use of AI without any foundation (see: Ian Malcom, aka Jeff Goldblum). I see business owners using AI to gin up a gorgeous website…and then have no idea how to make the backend work. They bring a page full of html code and “just need a button to take customers to a payment form and then deliver a digital product.”

Pretty is awesome…but it also has to work.

The ease of creating a beautiful frontend page quickly leads people to think that there is also a magic button to create the backend equally quickly, in whatever software they are using. And that if they ask AI, it will magically give them the solution in 3 sentences, and tell them exactly how to do it.

If AI miraculously understands the question (most people don’t know what to ask for) how will the user know how to do what AI tells them?

Your brain is bigger than a dinosaur’s brain. Don’t stop using it.