I’ve been getting increasingly concerned about the impact on our thinking as we use more and more AI. I sent this email to the team this week, and I’d like to share it and my full thinking.
There is a deliberate oxymoron, of course, in using an AI-generated visual summary of an academic paper to make the point, but there is more behind that.
As I wrote back in March:
Cognitive offloading is a strategic delegation that costs nothing. Cognitive surrender is something different; an uncritical abdication of reasoning itself. And there is something about AI, about its allure and potency, that could make surrender far more widespread.
The AI models have got ever better, and we’re using them for more and more. We may be more productive, but might we be becoming less ourselves?
The divergence
This paper, which has not been peer-reviewed, argues that we’re experiencing a cognitive divergence. Our cognitive practices, measured by how long we pay attention to tasks and how much we read, have already been declining before AI. Now advanced AI encourages us to delegate more and more, simpler and simpler tasks, weakening the practices that maintain our cognitive capacities.