After all the dire warnings about AI robbing us of the ability to think for ourselves, the possibility of weakened mental abilities is a worry for those using AI. It’s not unfounded. Memory, decision-making, analysis and creative thinking could easily become weaker and atrophy if they’re used less and less.
But AI isn’t designed with the agenda of destroying your healthy thinking brain. It’s supposed to make working on things in life easier. Admittedly, AI often tries far too hard to please, actually making many things more difficult instead. But users still have a choice — not just whether to use it or not, but how to use it. It would surprise sceptics to know that AI can sharpen your thinking. If you use it to do so.
Powerful pressures
There are strong pressures on people to use AI in everyday life instead of doing things the long way around. First, there’s the ever-present threat of being ‘left behind’. If you don’t learn how to use AI with fluency and stay on top of advances, you could stand to lose out at work — both at getting and keeping a job. Meanwhile, more savvy people will compete at every step.
At the workplace, output is demanded at the speed of light today. A company may reward productivity and perfectionism, no matter how an employee achieves it. So it doesn’t matter whether AI is a shortcut or not. A company may reward productivity and perfectionism, no matter how an employee achieves it. So it doesn’t matter whether AI is a shortcut or not.
Students face much the same kind of pressure, and as we’ve seen lately, it all takes a toll on them.
No easy way out
Given all these pressures and the temptation to take the easy way out, how do you deliberately resist that temptation and use AI to enhance your thinking?
It’s understandable if you ask your AI chatbot to look through your email and find a specific one that you need. After all, it would take precious time and give back very little cognitive benefit to do that when there’s a tool that can hunt through your 500 emails in a second.
But asking AI to pull out the insights from a significant news article would perhaps be robbing yourself of the opportunity to analyse something important. The trick is to sharpen the intuition that tells you which tasks are worth avoiding the easy way out on. It won’t take too much time for you to automatically distinguish between what is really valuable to you and what isn’t.
Different approach
One thing to change immediately is the way one asks AI for something. The days when we just threw a keyword or two into the Google Search box are gone. AI requires a completely different approach: defining context, setting roles, outlining boundaries and establishing clear goals before asking for an output.
This requirement builds a mental skill known as problem framing. It forces the brain to map out what is needed before jumping to solutions, and this clarifying process could help people solve problems much better.
We’ve almost become used to being flattered by our chatbots. Some people deal with it in their own way. I ask it to stop, straight out. Or bask in the flattery and then ask it to tell me all that’s wrong. A few friends of mine get irritated. “I tell it to shut up,” a friend told me.
The more useful approach is to ask the AI to challenge you. Discuss what has been overlooked, ask for different viewpoints or debate a stance. Asking for counterarguments is a great way to fight back against the confirmation bias that comes from sycophancy.
Another interesting thing to do to exercise your thinking muscles is to present a problem, but do the background thinking first and then bring the AI in to attack, expand and test the idea.
None of these strategies can practically be used for everything you do while working with AI. But even if you were to use them once a week for some task, it would enhance your own thinking.
After all, technology is only as good as the people who use it.
The New Normal: The world is at an inflexion point. Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to be as massive a revolution as the Internet has been. The option to just stay away from AI will not be available to most people, as all the tech we use takes the AI route. This column series introduces AI to the non-techie in an easy and relatable way, aiming to demystify and help a user to actually put the technology to good use in everyday life.
Mala Bhargava is most often described as a ‘veteran’ writer who has contributed to several publications in India since 1995. Her domain is personal tech, and she writes to simplify and demystify technology for a non-techie audience.