Artificial Intelligence (AI) is proving to be a significant catalyst for various aspects of our professional and personal lives. It is being subtly incorporated into our electronic devices and online services that we use, making its use part of our daily routine without us even noticing it. For example, try looking online on your browser for “10 vegetable soup recipe” and you will see AI in action, providing at the top of the search results an answer to your search. That lady or gentleman on the other side of the line asking you for more details about your inquiry might also be an AI agent representative.
At first glance, this makes our lives easier. AI is at our disposal, ready to get any job done at a record time. On that note, that’s paradoxically making people jobless. This is not something new. Throughout history, we have witnessed how technological advancements have gradually replaced workers whose jobs were done in a manual fashion or using older technologies. Although this time, the impact is significantly broader across many industries. As AI combined with robotics and automation gets more capable of performing human tasks, we will see more waves of job displacements, and that would be a topic to discuss in another post, but keep this in mind that there are people already using AI as their therapist, financial advisor, friend, and even as their lover! And, there have been strikes because of that. Look, for example, at the one from the Hollywood writers.
So, how is AI impacting our critical thinking?
Well, this is not rocket science. We have all experienced at some point in our lives that the lack of practice of a certain activity entails that our performance in carrying it out worsens. Formally known as “Law of disuse“, introduced by psychologist Edward Thorndike. Conversely, we get better at activities that we practice more often, the “Law of use”, also introduced by the same psychologist.
Let me take a step back. How many phone numbers can you remember from the top of your head? Maybe you can still remember yours, but probably not any of your friends or loved ones. You don’t have to memorize them; they’re on your phone contact list. How often do you rely on any sort of street map navigation to drive, bike, or even walk to your desired destination? Even if you have done that route multiple times. So in these cases, before AI, we had already experienced to some extent the weakening of our capacity to use our memory.
Now, with the use of AI, it is impacting us at the next level of our cognitive skills, our critical thinking. While we can feel when using AI as being productive as ever, delivering tasks fast to cover up for increasingly tighter deadlines to keep businesses competitive, especially in the tech and consumer services market, we are compromising our cognitive skills as individuals. That effort that we put in the past to research a certain topic, to synthesize a group meeting to report a summary, or even to code software to create websites, mobile apps, or games, is gradually being replaced by AI (if it hasn’t been replaced already in many instances). Effectively, that’s leading us to make less use of our skills for problem-solving, as we conveniently can save that energy by using AI. Therefore, getting rusty.
Mitigating AI’s impact on our cognitive skills
First of all, let me put a disclaimer here. All this ranting about AI comes from my personal experience, reading, and talking with other folks about this topic. I am not a psychologist. Although what I am writing can resonate with how you feel about your current situation, I’d encourage you to do your research and talk to a professional therapist.
That being said, it is important to deliberately make efforts to make use of our brains. Writing can be an excellent exercise. For example, try to recall what you have done during your day and write a summary, or if you are a software engineer, do some random code challenges. Practice, without any assistance, your most precious skill that gives you value, and which you find joy when spending time on. Squeeze your brain, figuratively speaking. It’s not easy, and it takes discipline to practice something deliberately. That willingness must come from you first (I wrote a reflection about willingness that you can read here).
Socialize, in person if possible, and bring up topics to spark interesting conversations. You can have prepared a small pocket notebook with some ideas about topics to chat about, and those conversations will sharpen your critical thinking as they occur in real time, forcing you to stop and think on the spot.
Technology advancements are great, although we must also be aware of them and know how they impact our way of living, our communities, and ourselves.