AI has empowered anyone to code, but, as with many technical matters, not actually understanding the fundamentals comes with risks, writes Lewis Liu

“Explain to me in plain English” or “tell me how you would explain this to a child”. These are classic lines a CEO might ask a technical member of staff. While I find the intellectual laziness tedious, I sympathize with the rationale: as a CEO or any executive, you have to ingest a huge amount of information spanning from the macroscopic (geopolitics, central bank policy) to the mesoscopic (pricing, product-market fit) to the microscopic (that employee issue, website messaging). You “outsource” detailed thinking to employees, consultants or partners. There are problems enough with delegating critical thinking to other humans – so what happens when you delegate it to AI?

This column was inspired by a series of conversations over coffees and autumnal walks a few weeks ago when I hosted my old Harvard roommate, Momin Malik, who is now a leading AI safety researcher at the Mayo Clinic. We met sitting front-row center in our first ever college class freshman year (Theoretical Linear Algebra and Multivariable Calculus if you’re curious) and we’ve been debating ever since. Our debates started at the Harvard dining halls and continued at the Oxford dining halls, where we were both graduate students at the same time.

Momin has this habit of presenting me with a concept he’s given deep thought to, something that questions the very foundation of how we perceive reality. Back in college, it was whether the universe itself could or should be described by mathematics (I was a physics major in addition to being an art major) –........

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