(Spoiler: He’d Have Questions)
Socrates, one of history’s greatest philosophers, believed that wisdom begins with questioning.
Imagine Socrates Opens ChatGPT. Types a question. Four seconds later, a beautiful, structured, confident answer appears.
Socrates reads it. Pauses.
And then, very calmly, asks, but how do we know this is true?
That is the whole thing right there.
Socrates never claimed to know anything. That was literally his thing. He walked around Athens asking questions that made very smart, very confident people realize they did not actually understand what they thought they understood.
He did not teach by giving answers. He taught by asking better questions until the truth had nowhere left to hide. His approach is known as Socratic Dialogues.
And now that answers are at our disposal, instant, infinite, and incredibly well-formatted – that skill has never been more important.
A skill that nobody talks about enough. During my NLP coach training, I learnt the art of asking clean questions to explore our thoughts and feelings without judgement and biases.
Today, AI looks at everything humans have ever written, skims through documented data as well as the information it has been fed through training and generates the most statistically likely response to your question.
Which means if your question is shallow, the answer which may sound smart in words, is shallow too.
The input is everything.
The people getting the most out of AI right now are not the ones who use it most. They are the ones who know the art of asking right questions.
They ask AI for an answer. And then they ask, “What is this assuming?” What is this leaving out? What would the opposite argument look like?
They treat AI the way Socrates treated a conversation: as a place to arrive at comfort, a place to get closer to something true.That is a completely different relationship with the tool.
And here is the human part that gets me.
Every genuinely original idea that has ever changed anything, the theory of evolution, the structure of the internet, every product that made you say, “Why did nobody think of this before, came from a human who asked a question nobody else thought to ask.”
That question and curiosity live in a human mind. Specifically, in the mind of someone who has stayed curious enough, uncomfortable enough, and humble enough to keep asking.
So here is the thing Socrates would say if he were here: He would not tell you to use AI less.
He would tell you to question it more.
To walk up to every clean, confident, well-structured answer it gives you and ask, okay, but what are we not seeing here?”
Because of that question, that uncomfortable, slightly inconvenient question, that is where the real thinking starts.
That is where the human intelligence and curiosity begin. Lot of questioning is also an iterative process, as you get one answer it leads to another question.
And that is the part no tool can ever replace.
The smartest thing AI ever did was remind us how rare, good questions are. Are you asking them?
This article is authored by Ikshwaku Sharma, CEO – Rescript Consultancy