The cognitive capacity of our brains can become lazy. Evolution has delivered an amazing ‘machine’ that seeks to organise and optimise the use of the cognitive resources available. Like any muscle, when unexercised, it shrinks.
I stumbled across AI a week after ChatGPT was launched and was fascinated by the potential to inform, improve, and be provocative in the construction of blog posts, and critical writing generally.
At that point, I had written about 2300 posts over 12 or so years.
Initially, AI did deliver some of the hoped for benefits. When asked, it pointed out things I had missed, glossed over, or required checking. The writing remained mine.
Rapidly, the tool (at that time still exclusively Chat) started to exert its algorithmic power, subtly altering my ‘voice’. Almost unnoticeable at first, but progressively intrusive.
I built a customer ‘voice’ GPT at about a year, constantly updated, which slowed but did not stop the encroaching impact of the probability engine I was trying to leverage and tame.
Net result: far fewer posts, as finding that perspective and point of view that differs sufficiently from the AI generated slop to make it both interesting, and worthy of attention is so much harder than it was pre-AI.
I worry that we are encouraging what Daniel Kahneman would call ‘Systems 1 thinking’ and increasingly ignoring systems 2, from which springs all that is new, different, and ultimately what makes our lives better.
‘Cognitive debt’ is a term used by psychologist Daniel Pink to describe the impact on brains that use AI tools as a substitute for thinking.
When we substitute AI for thinking, curiosity, scepticism, we are softening and removing the instinctive frameworks we use to manage and respond to what is around us. We are removing the opportunity to exercise choice, apply experience and wisdom, to challenge and improve.
Just using tools to do tasks trains our brains to be lazy, creating cognitive debt.
I am 74, so the impact will not disrupt me. Arguably if you asked my wife, cognitive debt has already overtaken me. However, I have children in their most productive years, and young grandchildren, and the impact on them does bother me, greatly.
As a community, we need to ‘lean into’ AI, as it is not going away. Little kids ‘get it’ so give them access to the tools from the time they are learning to express themselves. Teach them how to ‘think slow’ to leverage the capability of AI tools, rather than just accept the slop delivered by ‘AI fast’
