At the Speed of Walking

What a cyclist in Luxembourg taught me about AI, twenty years before I needed the lesson.

As a teenager, I spent most of my weekends at Scouts. Building structures out of wooden poles, pitching tents, tracing potential routes through European forests with a finger on a paper map, long weekends, school holidays, whole summers of it. So it was no surprise that into my early twenties I kept hiking my way around Europe.

On one of those trips, a friend and I bought Eurail tickets: thirty days of unlimited train travel across the whole of Europe, day and night. The only thing we ever paid extra for was a seat reservation on the fast TGV lines in France. Freedom, essentially, on rails.

We left the Netherlands one morning and were in Luxembourg by afternoon. Rotterdam south toward Antwerp, a sharp turn at Brussels, then east through the forests of eastern Belgium as the flatness of home gave way to hills, cliffsides, ravines. The beauty of a rail pass is that you can step off anywhere. So somewhere past Luxembourg City, at a station whose name I can no longer remember, we jumped off.

The monastery and the stream

We asked the locals near the station where we might pitch a tent. We were keeping costs low, looking for the kind of open ground that municipalities set aside for hikers and cyclists passing through. What we found was better: the remains of a fourteenth-century monastery, a foundation, a few standing walls, surrounded by a vineyard. It was boarded off, but there was enough grass beside it for a tent.

A stream ran nearby, cold and inviting. We set up camp, stowed our bags, and went for a swim. The current in the middle would pull you along if you let it, so we kept mostly to the banks, braving the crossing now and then to explore the far side. Over there, a small road meandered along the water. No cars. We walked the hot tarmac barefoot, up and down, hunting for fruit trees, ate what blackberries we could find, and headed back toward our crossing point.

That's when we saw the cyclist.

The man walking his bicycle

He was coming up the hill toward us, but not riding. Walking, bicycle in hand. We jumped back in the stream rather than wait, and by the time he reached us and we'd climbed out to talk, dripping in our swim shorts, I couldn't stop looking at his bike. There was nothing wrong with it. So why was he pushing it up a perfectly rideable road?

I asked him. The next town was still a handful of kilometres away; wouldn't he rather ride, get there, set up his tent?

He stared at us for a second, looked deeply into our eyes as if weighing whether the wisdom he was about to share would land in our young minds. Then he took a breath, lifted his eyebrows, and told us his story.

He was in his early fifties. He'd been successful enough in his work that the business ran on without him, and he could take long stretches away. He was cycling from England across Europe into the East, seeing where the road would take him. And when the distance between towns allowed it, twenty, thirty kilometres, he'd rather walk the four or five hours than cycle it in one.

My friend and I looked at each other, and I could see the thoughts running through his head. Thoughts I was struggling to comprehend myself. We had just covered three hundred kilometres in a morning. And here was a man choosing to make an hour take five.

What the brain absorbs

His reasoning, as he explained it, was this: the human mind is designed to absorb and store the world at the speed of walking. Travel by bicycle, by car, by fast train, by aeroplane, and the journey compresses. The time from A to B shortens, and something gets lost in the compression.

I won't pretend our train ride had been empty. Quite the opposite. We were at that age where everyone was graduating, or between jobs, or deciding what came next, and the train gave us hours for it. Are you doing a masters? Joining a company? Starting one? Freelancing? What are you actually passionate about? The landscape blurred past the window while these questions meandered through our heads, and our eyes drifted from the scenery to one another. We saw the journey. But we experienced the conversation. The terrain itself, the forests, the valleys, passed through us as a blur, beautiful and largely unremembered.

The cyclist wasn't against the bicycle. He owned one. He simply refused to let the tool set the pace of his experience. To really remember, to store something in a biologically made brain, to revel in it and relive it later as a memory, the value of the journey was to be on the journey. At walking speed.

Stepping off the AI bicycle

I promised I'd bring this back to AI, and here we are, because in that conversation by the stream lies a lesson for how we work now.

Use AI to change how you get from point A to point B. It is a remarkable vehicle, and I place real value on what it can do for us and with us. But don't lie to yourself. Don't kid yourself. Don't fool yourself into thinking that because AI made the journey, you comprehended it, that you can absorb the process it took, store it in your memory, and relive it as lived experience down the line. Everything we do with AI is a compressed experience. It happens at a speed no biological brain navigates. You arrive at B with the deliverable in hand and no memory of the terrain.

We cannot undo the momentum we've set in motion. The train has left Rotterdam. But just like the man on that hill in Luxembourg, we have a choice available to us at any moment: to step off. To get off the AI bicycle for a stretch of the road and do the work ourselves, at the speed our brains comprehend information and turn it into memory.

Some distances are worth walking.