Chain of thought

Recently a new AI thing came out and since this is barely about AI as I barely understand the dimensions of what is really going on, I'll keep my definitions vague. This new thing claims to have improved itself due to its ability to "reflect". It tries to model our way of thinking in order to increase its accuracy. Its thinking is done for a bit longer so that it reflects on its chain-of-thought before outputting the answer, that's more or less what I understood. This anthropological feature makes it the best of its kind out there, I read. "Anthropological?" - I thought.

How sad is it that what makes AI shiniest new toy special is the very thing we stopped doing? I, an introvert, have found myself for years pressured to "say something", for God's sake just "say something" their eyes begged me sometimes while at others people literally asked me to. Mind you there was rarely an adjective following. Never "something interesting" or "something funny", just "something". I assume that the lack of quality implied that I should just be myself and that would suffice, but this is exactly what I was doing...

Nowadays this rarely happens to me. I have an imaginary timer that goes off when I enter the zone I call "it's awkward now". I usually speak before that happens even though most of the time I am in the middle of my thinking. See, it is not that I have nothing to say, I do if you give me some time. Oh, to have the time to digest one's thoughts but while I cracked the egg and pinched some salt, all of you seem to be done cooking. Am I just too slow? Until I started working full-time after college I did not have a proper and personal answer to this. After being in too many meetings I now have a good guess.

We are looking for the best first idea. People are being paid to speak. We have curated a gratification system that measures and rewards performance by its volume and not its contribution. When did this happen? What is so critical but yet paradoxically does not deserve the time to be thought through? And while we are at it, what happened with "I don't know" as a viable answer? I assume we left the talking for too long to the loudest in the room and as every caste does, it naturally reinforced traits of the corporate machina to award the likes of them. Mea culpa, I guess. I do not know who put those chains here where our thoughts belong but I'm throwing them away.