"AI is the elevator..."

I want to re-visit two posts from this past year.  The first, "Are smart phones making us dumb?" talks about the journalist, Nicholas Carr, who wrote an article for The Atlantic in 2008 entitled, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"  Carr further explored this theme in his book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, suggesting that our online reading habits have changed not only how we read, but also how we think.  The second post ("Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid...") was based on an essay that the writer Jonathan Haidt (perhaps most famous for his incredibly insightful book, The Anxious Generation) wrote in The Atlantic in 2022, "Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid".  Haidt in particular writes about the dangers of social media and the adverse impact that social media has had upon society today.

I think both Carr and Haidt have an important message that should be widely shared.  However, in today's post I want to build upon their theme with a particular focus on artificial intelligence (AI).  You've probably heard a lot about AI lately.  Chances are, you've probably used some form of AI in the last 30 minutes!  Keeping with today's theme, the blogger Arshitha S. Ashok recently wrote an excellent post on Medium that asked the question, "Is AI Making Us Dumb?"  Ashok opens her post by writing, "The human brain has always adapted remarkably well to technology.  But what happens when the technology starts doing the thinking for us?"

It's a great question.  Ashok provides an excellent example with GPS and Google Maps.  When was the last time that you actually used an old-fashioned map to find where you are going?  I can't even remember the last time.  It's so easy to just type in a location, address, or name of a store on a smart phone app and follow the directions to get anywhere these days, that old-fashioned maps have become useless.  Unfortunately, the ease of GPS navigation comes at a cost.  We have lost the ability to read maps.  If we ever have to go back to the "old days" without GPS navigation, we are going to be in big, big trouble.  Can you imagine what would happen if the London hackneys switched to GPS navigation?

Apps have become so ubiquitous, and they have made our lives easier.  But at what cost?  Have we lost important skills that will be necessary in the future?  Just think about the lost art of cursive writing and how students today can't read anything in cursive (no matter that just about everything written prior to the 21st century was written in cursive).

But so far, I've just talked about computer applications that are supposed to make our lives easier.  What happens when machines start to think for us?  Well, guess what? We are there.  I can't tell you how many people I know use ChatGPT to write business correspondence, letters of recommendation, Powerpoint presentations, etc.  Many hospitals are now using AI as scribes to document patient encounters in the electronic medical record.  

Don't get me wrong.  I'm not being a Luddite (see John Cassidy's recent article in The New Yorker "How to survive the A.I. revolution" for more).  As Andrew Maynard writes in Fast Company (see "The true meaning of the term Luddite"), "...questioning technology doesn't mean rejecting it.  Just because I question whether using AI and technology has long-term adverse effects doesn't necessarily mean that I don't support using technology.

The problem is that there is now evidence to suggest that using AI comes with a cost.  Michael Gerlich ("AI tools in society: Impacts on cognitive offloading and the future of critical thinking") found a negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities, mediated by increased cognitive offloading.  Just as we have lost the ability to read an old-fashioned map because we use Google Maps instead, our brains have grown accustomed to using AI tools instead to analyze, evaluate, and synthesize information to make informed decisions.  As the saying goes, "Use it or lose it!"  It's as if our brain was like a muscle - the less we use it, the weaker it gets.

Similarly, a group of MIT researchers ("Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant or essay writing task") used brain mapping technology to show that individuals who use ChatGPT to write essays have lower brain activity!  The study divided 54 subjects between the ages of 18 and 39 years into three groups and asked them to write several essays using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s search engine, and their own intellect, respectively.  ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement and "consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels" compared to the other two groups.  Not surprising, over the course of the study, which lasted several months, ChatGPT users got lazier with each subsequent essay, often resorting to copy-and-paste by the end of the study.  These individuals had the lowest brain activity.  Now, it's important to realize that this was a small study that hasn't gone through peer review (in other words, it hasn't been published in a science journal).  Regardless, it will be important to see further research in this area.

Whether frequent cognitive offloading with AI technology will result in true changes in brain activity remains to be seen.  However, the evidence so far is fairly concerning.  A college physics professor named Rhett Allain said it best, when he said, "AI is the elevator, thinking is taking the stairs."  If you use the elevator all the time, you aren't going to be in shape enough to take the stairs ever again...