AI is unlike every previous labour-saving technology because higher-order thought is unlike any kind of physical drudgery. It’s the highest calling of what it is to be human. It means something different to give that up.
The one parallel I would draw is not to the butter churn or the washing machine, but rather to the infinite feed of digital addiction that our modern digital tech has also created. (Good timing: Haidt’s blog literally had a post by Courtwright yesterday on Limbic Capitalism which is his term for the addiction industry.) The world got a taste of what’s coming with infinite custom-generated content when Grok allowed porn generation for several months. The addiction it created is unsettling. People talking about gooning for 10, 12 straight hours. Same with gambling (though porn is worse). Makes us into beasts.
"The process of evolution is very slow... the rate of technological change has been supersonic. Our biology simply doesn't have the time to respond and so we are no longer well adapted for the world that our own hands have created...and probably never will again."
If being disenfranchised means being denied the potential for earning self worth in society, then I’d say those graduates instinctively know AI threatens to disenfranchise them. A lucky few may succeed, but the majority will struggle to find value. My guess is that’s their fear.
AI could be great...for some things, just like the internet and social media. Instead, humanity is already finding ways to make it a greed-promoting, intelligence-destroying disaster.
By coincidence, CBC's "The Current" aired an interview this morning with Cal Newport about the trashing of our attention span, and whose March 27 article in the New York Times also addresses this subject. In his interview, he bemoaned our passive acceptance of the latest technological depredations on our lives and minds.
He also noted that we could be witnessing the first stirrings of resistance to AI and all the other stultifying tools being forced on us and which leave us no choice but to adapt to them. In addition to the recent jeering of tone-deaf commencement addresses of complacent AI cheerleaders, there are growing signs of young people seeking out analog activities where they leave their phones at the door.
Maybe AI will swamp many or even most of our young people. But I believe there are enough kids out there who know at the core of their being that technology is harming them deeply, and they are no longer willing to accept it passively.
After all, if each of us knows intuitively that technology is degrading our humanity, then it’s up to each of us to push back against its encroachments in our own lives.
“The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the easy life of the gods would be a lifeless life.” – Hannah Arendt
Your brain is no different than your body muscles. If you don't use it, atrophy sets in. And with the brain, at an alarming rate that is harder to recover than hitting the gym and rebuilding your muscle mass. Things that are challenging, take time, give your brain a workout. AI can be used as a tool, if you use it to stop "working your brain", you will experience atrophy. We need people to think about it just like working out. schedule an hour a day to just work your brain.. read a book on paper, do puzzles, engage in a long form conversation face to face with a person (not bitching about memes, actual meaty convo), write,.. heck, buy a fancy dancy lego set and build something. Just keep working it. Physical things still matter, and always will. Let the AI junkies fall apart in front of their screens. I write all my business emails personally, and some will end up with grammar mistakes and punctuation errors because i am a human typing it fast. why? because my clients know they are getting ME, and not an AI agent bot. And that personal human contact is going to be a red hot commodity as more and more companies remove the human experience for AI. Hold the line on human contact, that will always win.
“AI can be used as a tool, if you use it to stop "working your brain", you will experience atrophy.”
I wouldn't contest this, or your other observations. What they leave unclear, though, is what the article itself leaves unclear; namely, why we should suppose AI any more prone to misuse than other tools. It's often been said that fire is a good servant but a bad master, and the same is true of humanity's innovations since the stone age—the wheel, steam power, electric power, motor vehicles—yet the decision has always been that the benefits of these innovations outweigh the risks arising from their misuse.
Walking is undoubtedly more beneficial for my health than sitting in a car; so is carrying things. Nevertheless, I'm not walking my luggage to the airport: I'm taking it and myself by car. I'm not spending all day walking to the cottage; instead, I'm driving for three hours, and I'll get my exercise from swimming and water-skiing when I get there. I'll sensibly leave the car in the driveway and walk to the local library branch to return a book, or to the pharmacy to buy a newspaper. But I'm not walking a message cross-town that can be delivered by email or phone. None of us is giving up the benefits of labour-saving devices just because misusing them would lead to 'atrophy.'
The benefits of using AI as a research tool are equally obvious. What isn't obvious is why putting it to this use would undermine anybody's ability to “ hold a number of thoughts and ideas in working memory,” or “work through an argument,” or reduce the incentives for doing so. It certainly won't stop my wife and I from reading books, assembling thousand-piece puzzles, or engaging in long form, face to face conversations. I'm not the least bit tempted to get AI to compose this post for me; but even if I were to try it as an experiment, I'd still insist on wielding editorial authority over the result. While AI may write better than I do, and have an incomparably larger knowledge base, this doesn't undermine my desire to have an internal knowledge base of my own, or determine the significance of its content and how to express my feelings about it. AI won't “vaporize” that any more than external information storage devices like books and databases could; because deciding what's important to me, and wrestling in reasoned, evidence-based ways through my own dilemmas, are tasks that can't be delegated—to friends, teachers, politicians, bureaucrats, religious leaders, AI or anything else—even if I were foolish enough to want to do this.
A perceptive take on an innovation that, like most of them do, is bound to have the defects of its virtues. On the one hand, being able to input search terms online that can retrieve not just a solution set of records containing those terms but—miraculously and unprecedentedly—judgments, is a fantastic aid to research. On the other, while a philosophy major I did enjoy the reading challenge presented by books in which an argument may require ten or fifteen pages to properly unfold itself, with no wasted words (as in Husserl's Logical Investigations, for example); and undeniably I felt a sense of achievement when graduate school essays my unaided brain had laboured to produce were rewarded with an A++, and lauded for their perceptiveness and originality.
ChatGPT is seductive, though. Exploring ideas with it is like talking with a best friend who's the equivalent of ten professors rolled into one, understands you perfectly, and seizes the point immediately. No more frustrating, circular, 'talking past each other' pseudo-conversations; just joint, relevant, illuminating reconnoitering of territories that can actually be manufactured as you proceed. For older individuals like me, who already have good reading backgrounds in literature and intellectual history, and a lifetime of thinking for ourselves behind us, being able to partner with AI is an enticing prospect. As a retired reference librarian, how could I not be excited by the quantum leap forward in information retrieval that LLMs represent?
I'm in no position to have an opinion about what the impact on younger people of being able to exploit such partnerships is likely to be. I understand the grounds of Mr. Potter's apprehensions, and he's given us considerable food for thought here. It's surely possible, though, that as with previous innovations some individuals will benefit from this one more than others, and in ways even the most far-sighted won't foresee. Every step into the future is a step into the unknown; maybe the neural substrate laid down in some brains through judicious partnership with AI will result in achievements and a clarity of thinking sufficient to make today's top intellectuals envious. Maybe, far from undermining a gifted student's ability to “ hold a number of thoughts and ideas in working memory” as he/she performs hard mental labour, the “sophisticated arguments, inferences, and evidence” AI makes available will provide stimuli, in the form of new variables to juggle and suggested avenues to explore, acting not as a constraint but a springboard for novel mental gymnastics.
Great piece! AI is going to flip the entire world on its head. Like the pre 1900’s those who actually do physical things/build things/fix things/sell things will be valued and those higher order ‘intellectual’ thinking/university jobs will be worth very little. Those lowly trades will make money. The problem is, the barriers to entry for physical work are low (hence why it has been paid less for the last 125 years), so even those occupations will not be high paying. The job market as we know it is already over, and changing daily. The standard of living that we’ve enjoyed will drop profoundly. It should equilibrate eventually but the transition will be awful.
My daughter had at least one classmate in her International Baccalaureate high school class who bragged that the program wasn't as tough as it was made out to be when he could use AI to complete all of the assignments. I'm wondering how that kid will be feeling when he gets his final grades, which are based on written, in-person exams with no computers?
As a first matter, Dr. Potter, I am compelled to ask to what extent did you rely on AI for any part of writing, editing, researching, etc. this essay?
My query is not at all intended to be cheeky. I am aware that many online publications assert that AI was or was not involved in the creation of a piece.
I am a retired CPA; I retired prior to AI becoming a thing and I have had little interest in learning AI in my retirement years. My adult daughter reports that she uses AI to lightly edit reports for inconsistencies, grammar and the like.
Given my age I recall when good accounting software was introduced and the fear of job losses. Those job losses DID occur but at the lower end of my profession. At the same time, jobs increased for positions requiring human analysis and creativity.
I very much wonder if AI will be much the same. I recall that when accounting software became widespread, I needed to understand enough about that software to learn it's virtues and it's many limitations so that I could best utilize it's output.
I have two resulting thoughts. First, might my experience with accounting software be indicative of the future of AI? Second, perhaps I should learn just a smidgen about using AI myself.
What impact will AI have on an individual's cognitive ability throughout their lifetime? Conduct a Standardized Mini-Mental State Exam with a variety of young university students and see what the results are. I think many would be surprised.
10/10, no notes. Banger article.
AI is unlike every previous labour-saving technology because higher-order thought is unlike any kind of physical drudgery. It’s the highest calling of what it is to be human. It means something different to give that up.
The one parallel I would draw is not to the butter churn or the washing machine, but rather to the infinite feed of digital addiction that our modern digital tech has also created. (Good timing: Haidt’s blog literally had a post by Courtwright yesterday on Limbic Capitalism which is his term for the addiction industry.) The world got a taste of what’s coming with infinite custom-generated content when Grok allowed porn generation for several months. The addiction it created is unsettling. People talking about gooning for 10, 12 straight hours. Same with gambling (though porn is worse). Makes us into beasts.
I agree with paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi:
"The process of evolution is very slow... the rate of technological change has been supersonic. Our biology simply doesn't have the time to respond and so we are no longer well adapted for the world that our own hands have created...and probably never will again."
If being disenfranchised means being denied the potential for earning self worth in society, then I’d say those graduates instinctively know AI threatens to disenfranchise them. A lucky few may succeed, but the majority will struggle to find value. My guess is that’s their fear.
AI could be great...for some things, just like the internet and social media. Instead, humanity is already finding ways to make it a greed-promoting, intelligence-destroying disaster.
Solid article. It's what I have been saying for awhile now, except not as well.
By coincidence, CBC's "The Current" aired an interview this morning with Cal Newport about the trashing of our attention span, and whose March 27 article in the New York Times also addresses this subject. In his interview, he bemoaned our passive acceptance of the latest technological depredations on our lives and minds.
He also noted that we could be witnessing the first stirrings of resistance to AI and all the other stultifying tools being forced on us and which leave us no choice but to adapt to them. In addition to the recent jeering of tone-deaf commencement addresses of complacent AI cheerleaders, there are growing signs of young people seeking out analog activities where they leave their phones at the door.
Maybe AI will swamp many or even most of our young people. But I believe there are enough kids out there who know at the core of their being that technology is harming them deeply, and they are no longer willing to accept it passively.
After all, if each of us knows intuitively that technology is degrading our humanity, then it’s up to each of us to push back against its encroachments in our own lives.
“The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the easy life of the gods would be a lifeless life.” – Hannah Arendt
Your brain is no different than your body muscles. If you don't use it, atrophy sets in. And with the brain, at an alarming rate that is harder to recover than hitting the gym and rebuilding your muscle mass. Things that are challenging, take time, give your brain a workout. AI can be used as a tool, if you use it to stop "working your brain", you will experience atrophy. We need people to think about it just like working out. schedule an hour a day to just work your brain.. read a book on paper, do puzzles, engage in a long form conversation face to face with a person (not bitching about memes, actual meaty convo), write,.. heck, buy a fancy dancy lego set and build something. Just keep working it. Physical things still matter, and always will. Let the AI junkies fall apart in front of their screens. I write all my business emails personally, and some will end up with grammar mistakes and punctuation errors because i am a human typing it fast. why? because my clients know they are getting ME, and not an AI agent bot. And that personal human contact is going to be a red hot commodity as more and more companies remove the human experience for AI. Hold the line on human contact, that will always win.
“AI can be used as a tool, if you use it to stop "working your brain", you will experience atrophy.”
I wouldn't contest this, or your other observations. What they leave unclear, though, is what the article itself leaves unclear; namely, why we should suppose AI any more prone to misuse than other tools. It's often been said that fire is a good servant but a bad master, and the same is true of humanity's innovations since the stone age—the wheel, steam power, electric power, motor vehicles—yet the decision has always been that the benefits of these innovations outweigh the risks arising from their misuse.
Walking is undoubtedly more beneficial for my health than sitting in a car; so is carrying things. Nevertheless, I'm not walking my luggage to the airport: I'm taking it and myself by car. I'm not spending all day walking to the cottage; instead, I'm driving for three hours, and I'll get my exercise from swimming and water-skiing when I get there. I'll sensibly leave the car in the driveway and walk to the local library branch to return a book, or to the pharmacy to buy a newspaper. But I'm not walking a message cross-town that can be delivered by email or phone. None of us is giving up the benefits of labour-saving devices just because misusing them would lead to 'atrophy.'
The benefits of using AI as a research tool are equally obvious. What isn't obvious is why putting it to this use would undermine anybody's ability to “ hold a number of thoughts and ideas in working memory,” or “work through an argument,” or reduce the incentives for doing so. It certainly won't stop my wife and I from reading books, assembling thousand-piece puzzles, or engaging in long form, face to face conversations. I'm not the least bit tempted to get AI to compose this post for me; but even if I were to try it as an experiment, I'd still insist on wielding editorial authority over the result. While AI may write better than I do, and have an incomparably larger knowledge base, this doesn't undermine my desire to have an internal knowledge base of my own, or determine the significance of its content and how to express my feelings about it. AI won't “vaporize” that any more than external information storage devices like books and databases could; because deciding what's important to me, and wrestling in reasoned, evidence-based ways through my own dilemmas, are tasks that can't be delegated—to friends, teachers, politicians, bureaucrats, religious leaders, AI or anything else—even if I were foolish enough to want to do this.
A perceptive take on an innovation that, like most of them do, is bound to have the defects of its virtues. On the one hand, being able to input search terms online that can retrieve not just a solution set of records containing those terms but—miraculously and unprecedentedly—judgments, is a fantastic aid to research. On the other, while a philosophy major I did enjoy the reading challenge presented by books in which an argument may require ten or fifteen pages to properly unfold itself, with no wasted words (as in Husserl's Logical Investigations, for example); and undeniably I felt a sense of achievement when graduate school essays my unaided brain had laboured to produce were rewarded with an A++, and lauded for their perceptiveness and originality.
ChatGPT is seductive, though. Exploring ideas with it is like talking with a best friend who's the equivalent of ten professors rolled into one, understands you perfectly, and seizes the point immediately. No more frustrating, circular, 'talking past each other' pseudo-conversations; just joint, relevant, illuminating reconnoitering of territories that can actually be manufactured as you proceed. For older individuals like me, who already have good reading backgrounds in literature and intellectual history, and a lifetime of thinking for ourselves behind us, being able to partner with AI is an enticing prospect. As a retired reference librarian, how could I not be excited by the quantum leap forward in information retrieval that LLMs represent?
I'm in no position to have an opinion about what the impact on younger people of being able to exploit such partnerships is likely to be. I understand the grounds of Mr. Potter's apprehensions, and he's given us considerable food for thought here. It's surely possible, though, that as with previous innovations some individuals will benefit from this one more than others, and in ways even the most far-sighted won't foresee. Every step into the future is a step into the unknown; maybe the neural substrate laid down in some brains through judicious partnership with AI will result in achievements and a clarity of thinking sufficient to make today's top intellectuals envious. Maybe, far from undermining a gifted student's ability to “ hold a number of thoughts and ideas in working memory” as he/she performs hard mental labour, the “sophisticated arguments, inferences, and evidence” AI makes available will provide stimuli, in the form of new variables to juggle and suggested avenues to explore, acting not as a constraint but a springboard for novel mental gymnastics.
Great piece! AI is going to flip the entire world on its head. Like the pre 1900’s those who actually do physical things/build things/fix things/sell things will be valued and those higher order ‘intellectual’ thinking/university jobs will be worth very little. Those lowly trades will make money. The problem is, the barriers to entry for physical work are low (hence why it has been paid less for the last 125 years), so even those occupations will not be high paying. The job market as we know it is already over, and changing daily. The standard of living that we’ve enjoyed will drop profoundly. It should equilibrate eventually but the transition will be awful.
My daughter had at least one classmate in her International Baccalaureate high school class who bragged that the program wasn't as tough as it was made out to be when he could use AI to complete all of the assignments. I'm wondering how that kid will be feeling when he gets his final grades, which are based on written, in-person exams with no computers?
As a first matter, Dr. Potter, I am compelled to ask to what extent did you rely on AI for any part of writing, editing, researching, etc. this essay?
My query is not at all intended to be cheeky. I am aware that many online publications assert that AI was or was not involved in the creation of a piece.
I am a retired CPA; I retired prior to AI becoming a thing and I have had little interest in learning AI in my retirement years. My adult daughter reports that she uses AI to lightly edit reports for inconsistencies, grammar and the like.
Given my age I recall when good accounting software was introduced and the fear of job losses. Those job losses DID occur but at the lower end of my profession. At the same time, jobs increased for positions requiring human analysis and creativity.
I very much wonder if AI will be much the same. I recall that when accounting software became widespread, I needed to understand enough about that software to learn it's virtues and it's many limitations so that I could best utilize it's output.
I have two resulting thoughts. First, might my experience with accounting software be indicative of the future of AI? Second, perhaps I should learn just a smidgen about using AI myself.
As my profession says, learning never stops.
Reminds me of what Socrates says about the ability to read and write stealing away our ability to remember. What does AI steal away from us?
Darn. I was going to create my first ever Substack post, using AI, but now the cat is well and truly out of the bag.
As M. Poirot would say, it’s back to ‘the little grey cells’.
What impact will AI have on an individual's cognitive ability throughout their lifetime? Conduct a Standardized Mini-Mental State Exam with a variety of young university students and see what the results are. I think many would be surprised.
AI sucks!
Excellent dispatch..it certainly made me have a real good ponder