The other day, my iPad quit downloading emails. My husband took a picture of the error message and uploaded it to ChatGPT. ChatGPT provided clear step-by-step instructions for fixing it. The instructions worked!
An Article in The Atlantic magazine tells of a man
who uses AI (Anthropic’s Claude) for up to eight hours a day, sometimes running
as many as six sessions simultaneously. At the market, he takes pictures of
fruit to ask if it’s ripe; he consults Claude for marriage and parenting advice;
he asks Claude if a particular tree needs to be removed from his yard, and so
forth.
Apparently, like the man described above, some people rely
on AI to navigate basic aspects of daily life. For these compulsive users, AI
has become a primary interface through which they interact with the world. The
article calls this “outsourcing your thinking.” One man found himself turning to
AI when a woman sitting next to him dropped her AirPod between the seats on the
train. His first instinct was to ask ChatGPT for a solution rather than figure
it out for himself.
Researchers are now getting a picture of how AI use might
affect your mind. One researcher believes that AI tools “exploit cracks in the
architecture of human cognition. The human brain likes to conserve energy and
will take available shortcuts to do so. It takes a lot of energy to do certain
kinds of thought processes. Meanwhile, a bot is sitting there offering to take over
cognitive work for you.” In this researcher’s view, using AI to write your
emails, for example, isn’t laziness so much as it is a naturally adaptive
behavior.
Wow! Naturally adaptive behavior! That strikes me as kind of scary. What
will become of our brains?
For an introduction to this blog, see I Just Say No; for a list of blog topics, click the Topics tab.
No comments:
Post a Comment