Advait Sarkar

Okay, I've got to make a deck as well.

You know the drill.

All right, oh, I was supposed to prototype something as well.

Let me vibe code something.

All right.

All this looks good.

Let's go.

This isn't a vision of the future.

This is a completely plausible, if slightly exaggerated, picture of the world of knowledge work today.

Welcome to the age of outsourced reason, where the knowledge worker no longer engages with the materials of their craft.

We've become intellectual tourists.

In our own work, we visit ideas.

We don't inhabit them.

Our relationship to our work is entirely intermediated by AI.

Some might say alienated.

We've heard that story before.

What I want to focus on today is that using AI in this way can have profound implications on human thought.

Consider creativity.

On an individual level, we might think that AI is a creativity boost, giving us rapid access to new ideas.

But numerous studies have shown that on a collective level, knowledge workers using AI assistance produce a smaller range of ideas than a group working manually.