Cognitive Surrender
I've marveled lately at the active surrendering of cognition to AI that I've witnessed.
I watched a guy at work use ChatGPT to draft a four-sentence letter for a customer. I said "that's ridiculous, man" and he said "it just helps me sound better" which didn't make it less ridiculous to me. He's fully capable of drafting that letter on his own in just a couple minutes if he wanted to. It would have sounded perfectly fine. I've seen him perform similar tasks, and I'm 100% certain he could have done it. But instead, he let AI do it for him because it was faster and easier. There wasn't any rush. He just didn't want to do the thinking.
The same guy was paying for a monthly subscription to ChatGPT for a while (canceled it now, though), and has used it to tell him if his outfit looked good. 'Cause who cares what he thinks of his outfit, right? Better get AI to give him an "opinion" so he knows he doesn't look like a fool. It genuinely blows my mind. I don't care what another person thinks of my outfit, let alone a fucking AI model.
I get angry about this sort of thing. Part of that anger has to do with the environmental disregard, and the lack of empathy for communities already impacted by data center pollution. But I think it's also a fear response. I get mad because the world I see developing in front of me is scary. It could still be stopped. We don't have to forfeit our minds to the computers. I know AI isn't going anywhere, but we don't have to surrender the very thing that makes us human to it either. AI isn't capable of cognition. It has superior computing power, and has been trained on far more expansive materials. But we are the dominant beings. Will we always be, though? Or are we staring down the barrel of a bad sci-fi movie where all the main characters make the dumbest fucking decisions and sacrifice our species in the process?
We'll have to protect our daughter from AI proliferation and cognitive surrender. Her generation is the first to grow up without knowing a world before AI was in everything. It scares me that we might not be able to protect her—that pressure from the world around her when she's not safe in my arms might overpower our parenting. But I suppose all I can do is my damndest. As with everything, I think, it starts with the example.
I laugh or shake my head sometimes at the old folks who are so resistant to well-established technology like debit cards, online banking, and email. That's probably going to be me some day when it comes to AI. But at least I won't be one who surrendered my mind to it.