Episode 17: Artificial Intelligence and using your brain

Ay ay ay… where to even begin?

I think my beef with artificial intelligence and ‘using your damn brain’ starts all the way back in 2018.

Around that time I became cognisant of how Google Maps had hindered my ability navigate without it. I moved to two new cities in the space of a few years (Edinburgh and Melbourne). New streets, new layouts. I had this lurking feeling that relying on my phone too much was maybe a bad thing (and annoying). So I gave myself mini challenges of studying the route, and not taking out my phone. And getting lost. And asking for directions. I got invited on a road-trip when I was living on Australia. I insisted we ban Google, specifically Maps. Getting lost en-route was part of the plan. It was the best road-trip I’ve ever been on. Adventure really is about the journey, not the destination.

I have used Maps over the years when I truly needed it. But these early experiments taught me something about the digital tools we use. Best summarised as:

If you use your damn brain, you might just learn something.

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Unfortunately, fast forwarding to 2025 we find ourselves in a horror-movie timeline. Some recent headlines:

“Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task” – MIT Media Lab

“Is AI dulling our minds?“ – The Harvard Gazette 

“Feeds, Feelings and Focus: A systematic review and meta-analysis examining the cognitive and mental health correlates of short-form video use” – Psychological Bulletin (peer-reviewed scientific journal). Not on AI, I’ll get to this one in a sec.

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I felt anxiety coming of age into our World War Z/Gen Z social world of phone snubbing, doom-scrolling, isolated individuals.

Now I feel fear. A real fear of what seems like an impending technological hive-mind (anyone else watching Stranger Things?).

If students default to chatgpt to do their homework. If the lonely reach to claude to patch the wound. If the confused reach to gemini to solve their problems. Then we narrow our world of experience. We stop using our thinking muscles of our brain, and hamstring ourselves intellectually and emotionally. We let machines talk people over the edge. We let 2010-2022 Reddit archives define what is ‘good’ relationship advice. We never learn how to do task X, because we got chatgpt to do it.

Back to my lessons of adventure. It’s not about the destination. You don’t write essays during your undergraduate because you are expected to write anything original. You are asked to write essays so you practice the hard muscle of thinking. It’s the journey. This lesson applies to a lot of the applications of AI, particularly in the workplace. Not only does a lot of ‘grunt-work’ teach you things, its complete folly to believe if your employer embraces AI to ‘streamline’ your job, that you are going to be working less.

Second to that, this AI hive mind I’m finding regurgitated everywhere is so boring. Swinging back to social media, I’ve becoming increasingly distressed about the amount of conversations/jokes/interests I’m having with peers that are just someone else’s (or a machine’s) opinion pulled from the slopspace that is social media. I know this isn’t strictly AI, but given the amount of AI content now on social media, the line is becoming increasingly blurred. Worst offender, unsurprisingly, being AI generated short-form video content.

Who really wants a world where everyone’s ‘hot takes’ are just pulled from the same viral video series? That we argue about computer-generated distractions? That we allow our expectations to run out of control because someone on the internet put us up to it (so they could make some money)? And all the while we are being trained and numbed so that we don’t question this, so that we don’t use our brain, or think for ourselves. 

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My advice for this realm is just to use AI tools very sparingly. They’re often a short-cut. But they are also sycophantic (they suck up to the user and stroke your ego); they’re prone to errors and providing false information. More importantly, they are a short-term gain and long-term loss.

No such thing as a free lunch I guess.