Are We Thinking Less in a World of AI?
There appears to be little to no disagreement that technological advances over history have created opportunities and raised the base level of our collective intelligence as a people. There do, however, appear to be many disagreements as to if these advances have outweighed the costs. At the forthcoming of new technologies, there is always an abundance of skepticism that dissipates over time for the many…and festers in that time for a few. We are at a perceptional crossroad for a new technology: AI.
“Write a 5 paragraph essay on a childhood memory. Make it about my family having a barbecue and relate it to lessons learned for the following prompt: [copy/paste school prompt]”
***16.35 seconds later***
[copy/paste the text into a Word document; save; close program]
This 2-5 minute process is all it takes now to get your work done in school. What do you learn using this process? The only thing you could learn is that school is wasting your time. The alternative to the above action is to spend 2-5 hours across a couple days to outline, write, and type the paper by hand (and this is assuming you have an idea, motivation, and time to do that). Recent history has shown us that the amount of time we feel we have seems to be less every year. So again, why would anyone choose the second option to complete the work?
The response you have to this question is what determines how you feel about AI and its “benefits.” On one hand, the work you are asked to do (that you really never cared to do in the first place) is now complete in a fraction of a fraction of the time! On the other hand, you didn’t, actually, learn anything useful for your future. Society and the education system will say you failed yourself…and they are not completely wrong.
The moment you use AI to complete work for you is the same moment where you decide (consciously or unconsciously) that the work asked of you is not worth your time or future. In some cases, that may very much be true! But, I implore you to consider that you may not know what skill you missed out on that could be beneficial to your future success. So what do we do? If AI is the problem, we should remove it.
RIght?
Absolutely not!
The problem is not and never will be AI. The problem has been and will always be how we use AI. AI is a tool and, like any other tool, we have to learn how to use it. To be more precise, we need to learn WHEN to use it. Before AI, people have always found a way around doing tasks they don’t care to do or to simply accept a lesser end product. Now that we have accessible and powerful AI, it is so tantalizing to utilize it to get through our tasks with ease and proficiency. I don’t advocate for people to avoid AI or punish those who use it. I advocate for people to take a deep look at how we can use it and when to use it to produce smarter people and give all of us more time for the things we care about.
Fun fact: This article took 40 minutes to construct and another 25 minutes to edit