Introduction
We are in a time were almost all of our cognitive efforts can be handoff to a genie. Tasks like Writing, Brainstorming, Researching, Problem solving are now outsourced from our minds to a machine. A machine that is incredibly powerful and sometimes better than human. Yes, I’m talking about AI.
AI is a force multiplier. We built an extension to ourself, and multiplied our abilities. And there ain’t no reason anymore to spend countless hours, trying to write that perfect material, to organize ones thoughts, or to fathom the difficult art of story telling.
But what happens to us, to an individual and to our societies, when effort becomes optional?
When we give up our primal functions of our brains, how it effect us in the long terms?
History & Technological Advancements
Inventions helped us thrive as a species. But each time we give birth to a new thing, we’ve met with some kind of compromise.
For example, Socrates famously argued against writing, warning that it would weaken human memory. He was right, it did. The oral memory have objectively got worse among literary societies. But writing offloaded memory, so that we could focus on bigger thinking. The net value of writing was exponential against it’s drawbacks.
Similarly during the advent of calculators, scholars pointed out that it will reduce the human minds ability to do complex arithmetics. The thought was that, math is thinking. Even though that’s true, and we’ve had degraded our ability since then to do math on our head, calculators helped to abstract out the basic calculations, and focus on bigger mathematical problems in engineering, finance etc. And helped mankind going forward.
There were technological advances throughout human history, that have changed the gears of the working society. Like bicycles, computers, internet and so on. They’ve been an extension to human mind & it’s capabilities. Even though it might have brought a minor, partial degradation in human ability, it offered a much fruitful outcome.
But how is AI different from others?
AI is not only an extension, it is a replacement.
When the other inventions provided a tool to offload a product of thinking, AI replaces the thinking as a whole.
Consider a College student tryna write a Thesis. The process used to involve: finding a topic, researching about it, brainstorming and organizing the talking points and finally converting it into a story another person could read. It is a process that took hours, effort and patience. Now all that can be done within seconds, and get a 10/10 output.
Our academical institutions rewards the outcome over process. So using an AI tool is the most sane path in front of a student. Because all that steps and extra hours spent is basically pointless.
Just as same as someone writing an email, it’s waste of time to put in all that effort to compose an important mail, if could just ask & get it.
For me, at work, I could design an entire system architecture with AI for my next project, and then use the AI to build and even host it on it’s own (even though it’s not fully there yet, I truly believe, at this pace it will soon be).
The process is now eliminated. The cognitive effort is now an optional commodity.
And the consequence of this ease starts at neurological level.
Desirable difficulties
The term is coined by a psychologist of 1990s, Robert Bjork. The core idea is that, if the process of learning is hard at the moment, the likely it sticks in our brain.
In other words, ease kills retention.
For example, Testing yourself on a topic/material, even before you fully-learned it, produces better long term memory that re-reading it multiple times.
Similarly, taking notes by hand beats typing them verbatim. Not because handwriting is magical, but because you can't write as fast as someone speaks, so you're forced to compress, paraphrase, and prioritize in real time.
And according to nuerogenisis studies, there are thousands of new neurons added to hippocampus every day, in which thousands among them dies within a few days. The ones that survive in the aren't the ones that watched something happen. They're the ones recruited during the hard part, the retrieval, the construction, the working-through-something-difficult moment.
In short, neuroscience tells us is that the brain doesn't grow through exposure to information, it grows through effortful engagement with it.
This is where AI creates a specific and subtle problem that it removes the gap. And the gap is where learning happens. and over time it can cause significant cognitive attrition to human kind.
Use-it-or-Loose-it
“The principle use it or lose it explains how neural circuits that are not actively engaged in performing tasks for an extended period of time begin to degrade. Quite literally, this means if we do not use an area of our brain for a prolonged time, we will lose the function that was previously stored there.”
A constant reliance on AI for writing is the reason why now I’m struggling to write :).
If you’re someone been using AI to offset your work or some task for sometime now, it must be easily visible that your ability to do that task is now a challenge.
So imagine our upcoming generation. The ones born into a time where they don’t use their cognitive skills.. at all. I might be exaggerating, but if you consider on a macro-economical scale, the impact is massive. In the next 20 years, considering we are heading the same path without any reflection on the consequence AI, we’ll have a Natively dumb society overruled by god-like technology. bhahahahahaa.
Compensative Measures
If we look at the era when machines like dishwasher and land-movers came into play in 1960s, the average physical incidental movement reduced almost ~3%.
As the physical effort became lesser over time, people started to notice health implication came with it. The consequence was visible, in terms of obesity and other health related medical conditions.
This is the same period we invented the concept of “Work Out”. We built it into culture, language, routine and even morality, that you’ll feel bad to yourself when a gym session is skipped. As machines removed "incidental movement" from daily life, humans began inventing "artificial movement" in the form of gyms and structured exercise.
We’ve always found ways to live with technology by making a net positive value by compensating with other measures.
So what can we do about AI? This area is under ongoing research. But the pace of these researches and commitments are not equating against the pace at which AI is evolving.
We cannot ditch AI entirely, nor de-promote it’s usage. It’s naive and rather counter intuitive. If you’re deciding not to take advantage of AI, someone else will, and they’ll have a massive advantage over you in life and career. Our society is run based on outcomes and productivity.
What we need isn't less AI, it's the deliberate cultivation of effortful thinking in the spaces where it matters most.
Some concrete anchors I can think of is:
Conclusion
We should try to get the best out of this powerful addition to man-kind, without it making us dumber. It can be tempting to hide being the hype. To be the consumers, until it consumes us. There should be initiatives by us as individuals and organizations and government's, before it’s too late. And the first step of prevention is educating ourself of it’s impact.
The good part is that AI itself can be a help to figure out measure to reduce it’s impact. Even this article is a collaborative of research by Claude and words by me.
References
Agrimis, J. (2024). Principles of Neuroplasticity: Use it or Lose it. NeuroLab 360.
https://www.neurolab360.com/blog/principles-of-neuroplasticity-use-it-or-lose-it
Shors, T. J., Anderson, L. M., Curlik II, D. M., & Nokia, S. M. (2012). Use it or lose it: How neurogenesis keeps the brain fit for learning. Behavioral Brain Research.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3191246/
Church, T. S., Thomas, D. M., Tudor-Locke, C., Katzmarzyk, P. T., Earnest, C. P., Rodarte, R. Q., Martin, C. K., Blair, S. N., & Bouchard, C. (2011). Trends over 5 Decades in U.S. Occupation-Related Physical Activity and Their Associations with Obesity. PLOS ONE.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0019657
Grinschgl, S., Meyerhoff, T., Schwan, S., & Papenmeier, F. (2021). Consequences of cognitive offloading: Boosting performance at the cost of memory?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8358584/