Advait Sarkar

We've created a hive mind, except the hive is really boring and keeps suggesting the same five ideas.

Consider critical thinking.

We surveyed knowledge workers about their use of AI.

They reported that they put less effort into critical thinking when working with AI than when working manually.

And this fact was greater when they had greater confidence in AI and less confidence in themselves.

Consider memory.

When people rely on AI to write for them, they remember less of what they wrote.

And when they read AI-generated summaries, it's hardly surprising that they remember less than if they'd read the document.

And finally, consider metacognition, which is the ability to think about your own thinking process.

Working with AI requires significant metacognitive reasoning about your task goals, decomposing the task, the applicability of Gen AI, your ability to evaluate the output.

These are things which are built into the process of working directly with the material and which become problematic when that material engagement becomes intermediated.

Basically, we've become middle managers for our own thoughts.

So what's the score?

We have fewer ideas, we think about them less critically, we remember them less well, and we have a harder time doing it.

Taken together, we can see that AI-assisted workflows can have profound effects on human thinking.

And this extends even to seemingly trivial, mundane tasks because these everyday opportunities for exercising our creativity, our critical thinking, and our memory are essential for protecting our cognitive musculature and allow us to rise to the occasion when an exceptionally complex task comes our way.

Studies show that when we don't use our brains, they get worse at brain things.

Nobel Prize Committee, please hold your applause.

Is this the cost of progress?

We've solved the problem of having to think.