I was recently driving with the family when the conversation turned to planking. We each shared our preference for hands or forearms (hands won) and compared how long we could hold a plank maintaining proper form (I lost). I found myself wondering out loud about how long a human being could actually do this. Within six seconds, the answer emerged from the backseat, “9 hours, 38 minutes and 47 seconds for a man and 4 hours, 30 minutes and 11 seconds for a woman.” End of discussion. Literally.
What, in the past, would have entertained us for quite a while — speculating which muscles might fail first or strategies for distracting oneself from the pain — didn’t happen because of one friction-free answer. And it got me wondering … about the effect of artificial intelligence (AI) on wondering.