AI Shouldn't Be the Muscle Memory Killer

I have seen several articles about using AI to remove the need for humans to perform tedious tasks or repetitive and lower-level work.  This can be beneficial, but there are two sides to every coin.  If you remember anything about the original movie ‘The Karate Kid’ one of the famous scenes was the ‘wax on, wax off’ technique to wax cars, but what was really happening was muscle memory being built.  Human tendency for many societal norms is to say the hard way is the stupid way and the easy way is the smart way.  Many of us heard growing up, ‘work smarter not harder’.  Mostly I agree, but there is much to be said about not losing the value of building muscle memory.

...there is much to be said about not losing the value of building muscle memory.

AI shouldn’t be the muscle memory killer, and neither should automation for that matter.  I mean why go to the gym and pick up and put down weight you can barely lift over and over when you can automate it with AI and robotics?  Why run in big loops or back and forth to end where you began over and over?  You can combine AI and robotics and watch it do it for you, right?  Clearly, these are facetious and rhetorical questions, because there is value in doing repetitive and tedious activities.  Part of that value is called muscle memory.

Part of that value is called muscle memory.

The issue comes when there is a need for prioritizing work, often due to a time constraint, which necessitates that time is spent on the weightier matters.  However, if that becomes the norm, there is probably something wrong in the process long before getting to that point.  The decision to prioritize the work in that way could be a band-aid for a bigger problem.

Yes, we want to have more time to spend on strategy, complex problem solving, and just figuring out the hard stuff.  The muscle memory built from repetitive tasks can allow us to better understand what should be considered in the background or the buildup to those complex problems.  It fosters more empathy for the grunt work that is underappreciated, especially if one finds themselves in a jam and has to do that grunt work.

It fosters more empathy for the grunt work that is underappreciated...

If allowed, the impact of loss in muscle memory due to AI overuse won’t likely be seen on a wide scale until the new generation of software engineers has risen.  Those software engineers coming along who will only know using AI for the repetitive work and have never experienced any of that repetitive and lower-level work for themselves. 

So, let’s benefit from AI, but let’s not allow AI to prevent our own human development.