During COVID, I began questioning the world at a clip I’d never experienced before. I’ve talked about that period before, but one particular example stands out.
I found myself wondering why Black Americans appeared to be disproportionately impacted by COVID compared to Black Africans. If the explanation was purely genetic, wouldn’t both populations be affected at similar rates?
My mind immediately started generating hypotheses.
I know African Americans had higher rates of underlying conditions. But why?
I knew there was a hypothesis that elevated rates of high blood pressure could be linked, in part, to the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade.
I wondered whether being forcibly moved from one climate zone to another, where the available foods were entirely different, had long-term consequences.
I pondered whether generations of being given scraps during slavery had influenced food traditions in ways that later contributed to poorer health outcomes.
My mind started spinning, as it tends to do.
So I turned to AI.
I shared my line of thinking with ChatGPT, and it responded with something I had never heard of: Migration Health and Nutritional Anthropology.
The thing I had been turning over in my head wasn’t some random thought experiment. There were people studying related questions academically. There were actual researchers, actual frameworks. A whole conversation I didn’t know I’d wandered into.
That was the moment something clicked.
While others were asking AI to write emails, generate images, or pretend to be experts (myself included), I’d been using it for something else entirely.
I was using it to think.
Not because AI is smarter than humans.
Because AI is connected to more of the human conversation than I am.
Five years ago, that thought would have turned into a dozen disconnected Google searches. If I had shared it with my husband, he probably would have said, “That’s an interesting thought.”
And it is an interesting thought.
But it was highly unlikely either of us knew there was an academic discipline adjacent to the question.
When we’re all as separated as we are and with all of our experiences becoming highly curated to our preferences, it’s surprisingly easy to spend our lives inside a very small corner of human experience.
Most of us do and it’s not because we’re closed-minded. It’s because there is simply too much to know.
AI doesn’t give me answers.
It gives me access to the conversation.
A question about health can lead to anthropology and a question about belonging can lead to sociology.
A question that feels deeply personal can suddenly become part of a much larger human story.
I suspect many of us have thoughts like this: questions that seem too random, too niche, or too disconnected to pursue. The kind we mention briefly at dinner and then forget about. Or don’t bring up at all out of embarrassment that you’ll sound a little crazy.
I’ve started treating those thoughts differently.
Instead of letting them die on the vine, I follow them.
For someone who spends a lot of time introspecting, that’s been an unexpected gift.
It gives my thoughts somewhere to go.
It reminds me that I’m rarely the first person to wonder about something, and almost never the only one.
And maybe that’s the most underestimated benefit of AI.
Not that it can think for us.
But that it can connect us to conversations that began long before we arrived and will continue long after we’re gone.