The promise of AI is hyperproductivity — more output from less input. Instead of spending hours reading a 20,000-word essay, we can ask it to summarise it in minutes, extracting the salient points. Instead of taking a week off to think about strategy, Chat GPT can conjure it up in seconds. Instead of carrying the burden of critical thinking, why not shove a pile of PDFs and notes into the prompter and get an instant well well-thought-out analysis?
We pay two prices for going all in on this world. The first is that we never learn the skills required to do the jobs ourselves. Some have dismissed this concern as similar to the introduction of calculators. While some were up in arms about the death of mental arithmetic, others of a more consequentialist persuasion saw it as lightening the burden on the mind. Instead of bending our minds trying to calculate numbers, we could direct the same energy elsewhere, supposedly on more meaningful things.
The introduction of GPS navigators had a similar impact. Before them, people learned directions to avoid paying the price of getting lost. However, with GPS, directions are learned by a kind of osmosis rather than a concerted effort. By driving on the same road over and over again, as instructed by the GPS, we come to know the directions by habituation if at all. Similarly, it could be argued that our minds are thus relieved from the burden of learning directions and the same energy can be put to better use.
Generative AI takes this phenomenon to a new level. Instead of learning how to write, how to feel, and how to think critically, we have now outsourced these admittedly strenuous mental functions to a chatbot. At what point is this simply too much? At what point are we no longer easing the burden on the mind and simply outsourcing the mind itself?
Web 2.0 (i.e. social media) promised instant connection. However, we learned later that the price was privacy and attention, a currency we never previously thought could be commoditised. A.I. promises hyperproductivity. Similarly, I think the price will be something unexpected. Moreover, we might find ourselves, like the boiling frogs of Web 2.0, begrudgingly paying a price to exist in a world dominated by Artificial Intelligence.
With this in mind, I wonder whether the price for playing with AI will be giving up, to an uncomfortable degree, chunks of one’s personality. Instead of paying the price of getting things wrong, AI might ease that burden. But it will do so at the cost of experiencing the loss and therefore at the cost of developing one’s person. In other words, the price to pay for a full adoption of AI could be reality itself.
Perhaps one day it will be said that the glass of reality is shattered, and we broke it.
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