We’re living through deep changes in the way we interact with technology. If you are worried that Gen AI is making you lazy, here are some ways to approach that…
On a phone call with a client, up came a question I’ve heard often: “Is AI making me (or people generally) lazy?”
What’s meant when this question comes up, I think, is a fear that our mental processes are somehow being eroded, that there are things we should be doing with our brains that AI has taken away from us.
There’s a lot to unpack there (that little word “should” for instance). Here’s my take on it (with help from a set of articles and papers that I used in my research).
First off, our brains are naturally lazy
Education expert Daisy Christodolou, writing on her Substack platform No More Marking, says human beings are cognitive misers: we try to expend as little mental effort as possible.
She cites no references for that but Wikipedia has an extensive and well-sourced page on the subject, so I am happy to work with it as a premise. The expanded definition in Wikipedia goes like this:
The metaphor of the cognitive miser assumes that the human mind is limited in time, knowledge, attention, and cognitive resources. Usually people do not think rationally or cautiously, but use cognitive shortcuts to make inferences and form judgements.
Because we are cognitive misers, we often engage in cognitive offload – using technology rather than our brains. Examples include using a calculator, writing a shopping list instead of remembering the items or using GPS for navigation. Writer Cory Doctorow memorably calls this the Great Telephone Number Forgettering.
An aside: you’ll see the term cognitive debt used a lot: this refers to an accumulation of underdeveloped mental faculties resulting from the use of AI’s efficient and seductive assistance. The term was used by MIT researchers who suggested that prolonged use of AI for tasks like essay writing led participants to accumulate this debt. See this Conversation article for more on that: MIT researchers say using ChatGPT can rot your brain. The truth is a little more complicated
Our poor lazy brains are overloaded
A new white paper by Megan Blakely and Elsamari Botha at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and coach Ashley Cheeseman, called Cognitive Overload and Wellbeing in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, points out that we’ve been making changes to the way we interact with the world ever since the First Industrial Revolution. From about 1760 to 1840 humanity in Western Europe and North America underwent “a seismic shift in the organisation of work, society, and human experience”. Economies that were once dominated by agriculture and handcraft became transformed into industrial, mechanised systems of mass production.
Over the centuries since, we have shifted to information-based economies which “require new cognitive capacities: abstract reasoning, digital literacy, and multitasking across virtual environments”.
In that world, we all have personal experience of information overload – too much social media, too much news, too many WhatsApp messages to cope with. We all deal with digital platforms that “amplify cognitive overload by flooding [us] with more information than can be processed, evaluated, or acted upon effectively”.
And AI can help with cognitive overload!
Cory Doctorow (he of the telephone forgettering) has these brisk things to say about why reliance on technology is not all bad:
Phone numbers: Doctorow is happy with only knowing two or three phone numbers. He has, he says, “retasked all that cognitive capacity to memorising and thinking about stuff that’s much less arbitrary and far more consequential than phone numbers”.
Reading (yes really): Doctorow notes that Socrates thought that reading would make us all stupid because we’d lose the discipline of memorising all works of literature (ironically, we only know that Socrates thought this because Plato wrote it down).
Telling the time: “I keep hearing about millennials who can’t read an analog clock, a skill that has as much objective utility as knowing how to interpret a slide-rule or convert from Francs to Lire to Deutschemarks. Not actually useless, but entirely bound to a specific time and place and a mere historical curiosity at some later date.”
Also, modern society depends on smart machines
Christodoulou remembers her grandmother making change for customers using mental arithmetic in Petticoat Lane, a street market in London. But, says Christodoulou, it is impossible for old-fashioned London street markets to sustain the kinds of living standards people expect today. “(Y)ou need supermarkets, cold chains, barcodes, computerised tills, sophisticated logistics, and much more – and all of it underpinned by machines that do calculations far quicker and more reliably than even the most experienced market worker.”
It’s a trade-off: you gain some, you lose some
The problem is that a lot of the basic routine tasks we’ve offloaded to machines had very useful by-products that we have now lost, writes Christodoulou. Among those:
* Knowing the basics of a skill allows people to develop their human potential (if you learnt to play the piano when you were younger, it could be something you end up doing for pleasure and enjoyment when you are older).
* More advanced and complex skills are based on simpler ones. ”If you don’t have the simpler skills, you can’t develop the more advanced ones. You can’t think strategically about chess unless you know how the pieces move. And the cognitive offload makes it less likely we will get the practice that lets us acquire the basic skills.”
So what might using Gen AI be doing to us?
The research I did for this blog post has plenty of examples of the ways that things can go wrong. Here, summarised by NotebookLM and then Copilot, and edited by me, are some of those:
AI can lead to cognitive laziness, where individuals rely on technology instead of engaging in critical thinking, resulting in superficial thinking and reduced capacity for deep learning.
Using AI to generate content can diminish creativity and originality.
Dependence on AI might impair memory and long-term recall.
Frequent use of AI can cause skills to deteriorate over time
The availability of AI in the workplace blurs work-life boundaries even more than they already are.
AI-mediated interactions between people (think about all those AI assistants in virtual meetings) can weaken human connections, impacting well-being and increasing miscommunication
Over-trust in AI recommendations can reduce the ability to troubleshoot and solve problems independently.
What are we to do?
In sum: yes, AI is useful. But there are downsides. My off-the-cuff answer to the client worried about laziness was this: look at it like eating healthily, or doing regular exercise (an idea I first got from a podcast featuring AI guru Ethan Mollick). These are things that require some thinking, planning and conscious choices. Using Gen AI for your work or personal life is no different: be aware of the trade-offs you are making. Does getting generative AI chatbots to write all your social media content mean you are losing those skills? Then stop doing it.
When I thought about it afterwards, though, this struck me too. Just as with healthy eating and regular exercise, be aware of that pesky word “should” in your head. There might be a whole bunch of unexamined assumptions that make you think you can’t ever have a piece of cake, not even at your child’s birthday party. Or that regular exercise means you have to be out on the road even if there’s a blizzard. Just because your mother’s voice is saying you “should” know the times table doesn’t mean you can’t use a calculator when the answer to 6X7 escapes you (as often happens to me, dear reader). Flexibility is also important in this fast-changing field.
Some helpful hints extracted by me and NotebookLM from my research:
1 . If your goal is to get a task done quickly, you should definitely use technology. But if your aim is to develop your skills, you shouldn’t. If you want to travel 26 miles as quickly as possible, drive or get a taxi – just don’t pretend that you’ve run a marathon. (Christodolou)
2. Generate your own ideas first, before turning to AI – do the brainstorming while driving and the cogitating in the shower. Keep using the mental habits you have already developed.
3. My method when writing posts like this is do all the writing myself, using AI for research assistance, or later as a reader or editor.
4. If you are asking AI for ideas, push it to be creative:
“Combine ideas #3 and #7 in an extreme way”.
“Even more extreme”.
“Give me 10 more ideas like #42”.
“Use superheroes as inspiration to make the idea even more interesting”.
(Taken from Against “Brain Damage” – by Ethan Mollick, professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania)
5. When learning something new, instead of, say, asking for help with homework, ask AI to function as a tutor that helps you learn. (Also Mollick).
It’s hard, but you have to make choices
In that podcast, Mollick notes that writing and learning are hard.
We have a lot of research on how we learn… we have to do the hard work. It’s just like exercise or dieting or anything else. You get benefits from the pain… The pain is the indicator that you’re outside your comfort zone. And people don’t like that, it’s stressful and it’s hard. So you could choose to delegate all your thinking to the AI, have it do the writing for you, but you’re not going to get any benefits from that… Just like other forms of work that matter, you want to take control over things that matter to you.
But be sensible! He uses the example of the difficult email to the boss, which might be so stressful that it takes you three days to write. “If the AI draft gets you there and you’ve already thought through the problem, I don’t see that as a big issue… I think we have to separate out the work that matters to us, where the process matters, from work where the output is just output and it doesn’t matter to us at all.”
In short: Make Mollick’s wise words your mantra: “think first, write first, meet first”.
Main picture: Theweeknd G, Unsplash
Other things I have written
What you need to know about AI hallucinations (hint: they aren’t hallucinations) – When AI makes mistakes, it’s called hallucinating. There’s a better, if ruder, word for it. That means this post contains what the dictionary calls vulgar slang. You have been warned.
How to get over hating exercise – If your years at school taught you to hate exercise, you are not alone. Here are some thoughts on how to move on…
Renee’s four golden rules of artificial intelligence – So much hype, so much uncertainty, so much information about artificial intelligence. Here are some guiding principles…
How can I help you make order from chaos?
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