Delegating Thinking to AI
We thought AI would take the menial jobs first. People doing creative works, especially the knowledge workers, would be safe. Interestingly, creative fields became AI's first target.
AI is now coding on our behalf, writing docs, preparing slides, and creating and editing images and videos. Briefly, all the works we thought we, the humans, are good at.
The silver lining is that AI is helping us do our jobs better. It's making us more productive by helping us produce better output in less time.
And that's supposed to be a good thing, right?
In a sense, yes. But not so if you think about it.
AI doing our jobs, helping us make sense of things, and making outputs faster are all good. But what isn't so is AI doing the very thing that gives us an edge as human beings. And that is our thinking ability.
Our thought process sets us apart from other beings. The way our brain works by making these complex neural networks is truly unmatched.
Still now, AI's secret to wonders lies in using statistical predictions to find patterns. This is AI "thinking," but not exactly the same way we humans do.
AI might be way faster and can do more complicated calculations, but it still lacks the complex thinking ability that makes us superior. But I'm afraid we're unwittingly giving this leverage away to AI.
It's okay to take help from AI to perform tedious and repetitive tasks, but that doesn't mean we should let it think for us. This way we are handing over the only real advantage we still have.
Our brain gets better the more you use it in increasingly complicated problems. The harder you make it work, the better it gets. And not for just solving that particular problem specifically, but better overall.
The opposite is also true, and that's what concerns me. If you don't let your brain work, if you outsource your thinking to AI by letting it think for yourself, then slowly but surely your brain will lose its capacity to think. And if you lose your ability to think, what would you have left?
You can't outrun some faster animals, and can't calculate faster than a computer; your working memory also has a limit.
The only thing that I can think of that differentiates you from other beings or AI is your thinking ability. You'd better not lose this edge.
Does that mean you shouldn't use AI?
I'm no tech luddite, and this AI era is also not going anywhere. Not anytime soon.
So what do you do then?
Take help from AI all you want, but not at the expense of your thinking. Thinking is hard. But that hard part is what's needed to make you better.
Recently I was inspired by Andrej Karpathy's LLM-Wiki and made my own version of it with an AI tool + Obsidian to build my own knowledge base. I fed it with all kinds of sources that I would earlier read or go through myself. Here AI would then ingest them and improve the wiki. This process served me well until now.
By letting AI do the thinking for me, I'm getting the output, alright. But that's a compromise of my future self. I'm depriving my brain from doing its work and improving as a result. Am I not doing myself a disservice?
Obsidian's graph view looks cool and all. But that's all about it. This LLM-Wiki specifically, and using AI in general, was not helping me much to grow, maybe except relieving me of doing the hard stuff.
I'm feeding the AI data, and it's giving me the answer, with no thanks to me or my thinking. It can't be good for me in the long run. Not using my brain and getting the ready-made results was, and still is, making my brain dull.
The longer this shenanigan continues, the deeper wound it will leave on my brain. Literally. Because the more you outsource your thinking to the AI and depend on it for your thinking, the worse impact it will have on your brain.
This warning is as much for you as it is for me. Because I'm equally guilty of delegating my thinking to the AI still now.
So what can you do instead?
Write that draft by yourself, and then take AI's help to make it better. Think out the solution for yourself and then ask AI whether there's any loophole in your thinking.
This way, you're taking AI's help and using it as your aide, without outsourcing your thinking to it completely.
Ideally, it would have been best for you to completely avoid using AI and do these painstaking stuff by yourself. That's the best-case scenario for your brain. But you can't totally avoid AI; that wouldn't be prudent considering everything.
What's the solution then?
Use AI, but with discretion. Use AI to help you do your job better without letting it do your thinking for you. This is for your best interest, because going forward, AI won't just take your job; it'll come for everything.
Your only real edge would be and still is your thinking. So don't lose it.