The fundamental challenge with ubiquitous AI is: the impact on our ability to think deeply in the near future. It's changing the way human beings think and conduct day-to-day activities like communication, collaboration, search, research, thinking, writing, and even problem-solving. We are experiencing a paradigm shift by gravitating from thinking to prompting and that's a tremendous change in how we approach work and life.
Prompting is a surface level activity, critical thinking isn't. This prompting can disturb our thinking abilities, that we have learnt and amassed over years of our work experience, both collective and individualistic.
Now, generative AI is deeply being ingrained into most software applications and it's making our lives more easier than ever. AI is not just eating software, it's eating human abilities to think and in fact most AI models are already showing tremendous results.
Our behaviour is changing, just like — how people started using calculators on cellular phones even for adding or multiplying single digit numbers. Likewise, the huge convenience factor with AI comes at the cost of lowering our cognitive abilities. We need to be more aware about protecting our ability to think and make decisions for ourselves.
There's a significant shift in the human psyche, at work, and even outside of work. AI is thinking for us, at least that's what it looks like. AI is the new personal assistant, so we can think lesser. What if we forget to critically think, eventually? Just like the Calculator — I'm not speculating here — and quite confident to say that most people have forgotten how to calculate with ease. It's not that we can't, it's just that it takes more effort when you don't calculate in your mind often. (We have lost touch)
Now, the other side of the coin is, why can't we see this as an opportunity for people to be more creative than AI? This is the positive aspect for all the creative folks. We can choose to push our creative abilities. Afterall, AI models are learning from us. Let us do better, feed it better, and cyclically continue to push our creative limits further and farther.
Another argument here is: eventually AI is going to help with all the menial work and create the space for us to focus on the important things. However if we depend too much on AI assistance, and choose to not sweat the small stuff, our brains might be impacted. Well, I'm not a neuroscientist, but we can already see how things are changing around us.
We can choose to be more creative than AI. Or we can also choose to avoid AI and think for ourselves, to the extent possible. In this new AI powered world, one should know what's really prompt-worthy and what's the work that is worthy of our critical and creative thinking.
Embrace AI, make it your buddy, your peer, and your new extension and personal assistant to enable rich possibilities in your work and lifestyle. However don't allow it to overpower your critical thinking or creative thinking and totally be driven by decisions taken by an assistant. It's only a means to an end and can't really be the end or replace you as the master. (Once AGI is here, it might be a different story all together)
Let's use AI for good. Let's not allow AI to impair, soften or dampen our cognitive abilities. Let's be sharp and get sharper by the day. It's an opportunity for us to push our limits and compete with the new peer: AI
Originally published on LinkedIn on February 16, 2025