§1. In our pursuit of the ultimate personal assistant, it's important that we do not delegate away the things that are actually worth doing, the things that might be ends-in-themselves, activities that our flourishing consists in.
§2. I'm concerned in particular with understanding, in the sense of the term that has to do with coming to know coherently and in all its detail the world, that great big set of all things that are the case, and maybe also of all things that aren't. To see it and to (re-)cognise the many ways its particulars are strung together.
§3. Let's call this act of stringing together particulars into a (provisionally, and not necessarily logically) coherent structure synthesis. Synthesis is a necessary part of understanding; a precursor to the more theatrical moments of insight which occur when this structure is nurtured and transformed as it comes into contact with experience and the other things we know into some significant form.
§4. To simplify excessively, let's think of synthesis as beginning with a set of ideas (not Ideas, but things that are thinkable) and proceeding by the acts of growing or simplifying this set, and importantly, tracing, or making explicit, the ways in which the items of the set relate to one another.
§5. This sort of thing, assembling this structure into some coherent shape, can take years, and even then it's never truly finished. But it is a beautiful and fulfilling activity, and to restate the point, necessary for understanding. Handing it off to an alien intelligence with the intention of staring at and internalising its output is a misguided thought, and maybe worse, boring too.