asking better questions: the key that unlocks the potential of AI
The idea almost seems counter intuitive, but today questions are more valuable than answers. The ability to ask the right kinds of questions is a skill that can start conversations and open doors as we enter into a new era informed by artificial intelligence: the right prompt will become the ultimate key to unlocking the full potential of this groundbreaking technology.
Questioning enables us to organize our thinking around what we don’t know. says journalist and author Warren Berger
“So, in a time when knowledge is all around us, and answers are at our fingertips, we really need great questions to know what to be able to do with all that information and find our way to the next answer.” Berger is the author of A More Beautiful Question and The Book of Beautiful Questions.
Research has found that a four-year-old girl asks, on average, about 300 questions each day. That number usually declines as they go through grade levels, to the point that, by high school, that number is almost always zero. Traditional school systems often value students having the correct answer more than their ability to ask the right question: memorization can only take one so far. In contrast, many law schools employ the Socratic method in their pedagogy. Socrates, who is credited with laying the foundation of Western philosophy, understood the power of the question, way back in 400 B.C. His method was to teach students by asking them question after question, forcing them to think critically about their ideas and to refine their beliefs.
Silicon Valley embraced the power of the question long ago. Larry Page and Sergey Brin knew how powerful questions can be. Google brought all the world’s information to our fingertips, but it was optimized by analyzing the queries posed to it by its users. Google is now striving to create genuine “machine intelligence,” a term Google prefers over the phrase “artificial intelligence” because it carries with it several connotations. Despite what certain engineers have said, Google is far off from arriving at the singularity—the combination of machine and human learning, to an extent that each is indistinct from the other.
There are incredible—and far more practical-- leaps and bounds being made in the “AI” space today. In November 2022, OpenAI released a chatbot called ChatGPT which quickly captivated the internet with its detailed responses and articulate answers. Over the past few months, people have used ChatGPT to help them accomplish all kinds of tasks. The New York Times called it “the best artificial intelligence chatbot ever released to the public.” Elon Musk said the technology was “scary good.” Many have said this new form of AI will have implications in politics, cybersecurity, and education. Others are concerned that students will outsource their writing assignments to the chatbot, ultimately diminishing students’ critical thinking abilities. Perhaps ChatGPT is just another technical evolution that will make our lives easier, just as the calculator did not take away our ability to perform calculations. At the end of the day, one thing is true- no matter how powerful ChatGPT is, it is useless without a curious human behind the keyboard.
Author and podcaster Tim Ferris says that asking dumb questions can be a skill, even a superpower. His premise is that humans are often made weak by their internal shame, and that often the “dumb” question is apparent to all involved, but everyone is too scared to ask it. Perhaps further developments in AI will allow humans to be less scared to ask dumb questions—especially in a circumstance when it’s not a human on the receiving end of the question. Who knows how far humans’ learning potential can go when we aren’t constrained by fear and shame?
Unfortunately for Socrates, he lived in a time where asking too many questions threatened the power structure. The ruling authorities thought that his teachings taught people to question authority, which ultimately cost him his life. His death is seen as a symbol of the sacrifices people must make sometimes in the pursuit of truth. Asking questions can be a very powerful force. Now that we live in a time when a question will provide you an answer, the only real question is, “what will you ask?”
If you’re looking for guidance on what types of questions can take your business to the next level, Gallant Culture has your back.
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