AI and Us: Would You Send Your Roomba to the Gym for you?
I'm reading my last article where I (kind of) argue for letting artificial intelligence editing and rewriting ones writings. I've thought a lot about this since and updated my position; I'm strongly against it.
A lot of the problematic effects of human-centered technologies are second order effects that are beyond what first meets the eye. When we think about the use Social Media we think about all the hours that are lost where we could have done meaningful things. When we think about students using ChatGPT to write essays we think about how they're don't practice writing enough and maybe learning less.
But the implications are larger. Algorithmically driven "Social" Media have direct effects on our cognition; for example, with shorter and shorter viral content they impact our attention spans and reduce our patience for things without immediate dopamine reward. So even when we do get away from our phones, reading a book, focusing at work or falling asleep in darkness and silence suddenly seem difficult.
Writing is thinking
When it comes to Large Language Models (LLM) like ChatGPT I'm particularly worried about writing. Because writing is a fundamental tool to think. In the words of Paul Graham:
The reason is that writing isn't just producing a stream of words. Ultimately, learning to write is learning to think. You don't want to stop learning that.
The standard midwit reply to this argument is that the arrival of AI is no different from the arrival of electronic calculators. But the two cases are very different. There's much more thinking in writing. Or at least, there should be.
So the second order effect could be that we not only get worse at writing, but worse at thinking. And then what?
There's a concept called desirable difficulty. For learning to occur, the brain has to work up a sweat, that's never entirely easy. Without confusion and hardship there is no learning.
And herein lies the danger to outsourcing all our cognitive tasks to machines. I'm sure there are countless more examples than the one of Social Media and ChatGPT that I used.
Work up a sweat
Everybody who works doesn't only produce results – crank out widgets – they also learn during the process. That's what careers (ideally) are, a long series of growth and learning experiences. Do we want to deprive ourselves of that?
I remember a late night TV ad in the 90ies (maybe those things still exist) where you could get a band around your waist that was supposed to train your belly muscles while you were sitting or lying around. I highly doubt they were effective.
We know it intuitively: For muscles to grow, they have to be overloaded (no pain, no gain, man). Or would you really send a machine to the gym in your stead to become stronger?