Thinking With AI
AI tools have gotten more efficient with time. It's like always having an assistant with you, one that is more resourceful and smarter than you. But what happens when we begin to rely too much on the assistant? Does that still make us inefficient?
The AI models have become so much better that they can identify a stream of consciousness thinking and make it sharper. They can even contribute to it by mimicking your style of thinking through your writing. So much so that at one point you find more utility in letting the models do the thinking for you. You rely on them to give you more creative ideas.
Thinking deeply isn't an easy task. You have to work with incomplete details and a lot of confusing perspectives. You have to start with a hypothesis and remain flexible enough to change it with credible evidence. You also need to sift through conflicting evidence and your personal biases to arrive at a valid conclusion. That's why writing is so important. By putting it on paper, your arguments become tangible, which you then refine and refine until you are left with a clearer and more polished version of the argument.
What if AI can take care of this process for you? You can run any wild idea through its deep-thinking capabilities, and it will give you the most refined answer with all the pitfalls in a matter of minutes. Your entire process can be finished in a matter of minutes. In fact, you can also ask for more ideas from AI that are already polished. With a good AI model, you can potentially work on infinite ideas. This realization makes you feel powerful.
In the beginning, this sounds like a dream. Your mind is free of thoughts. There's no burdening argument for you to decode, no struggle to extract meaningful insights from all the arguments; there's nothing left for your mind to decode. Your creativity too is just one prompt away. Every time you are stuck in a bad situation, you can conjure the best AI models and discuss the potential solutions.
The pattern gradually emerges without us realizing it. It might get too late before we realize that for even the smallest of challenges, we are reaching out to these models. All of the suggestions we get depend on the efficacy and training data of that AI model we keep referring to.
We might arrive at a point where our mind hasn't solved a problem on its own in a long time. Like a muscle that loses its strength without a challenge, our mind too could lose the skill of solving a problem. We may forget the mental models we employed to resolve our issues.
This is perhaps the most significant disadvantage of AI where it makes you, the master of it, redundant. But such has been the downside of technology in general. On one hand, it makes your life easy by removing all the challenges of your life; on the other hand, without any struggle, we become weak. Unless we keep discovering new challenges. So the potential solution is either you become redundant or look for new challenges.
Smartphones were a big gateway to remain connected with our family and friends. They complemented the joy of physical meetings. Now we are at a point where we are saturated by too many calls and messages. Smartphones have now become the cause of the strain in relationships and we have to find gateways to get away from smartphones.
Perhaps there is a cost to be paid for every technological progress we make. A good way to decide the possible price we might pay is to think in extremes. What can we lose if we take the usage to extremes? That's a good way to peek into the future. Not entirely accurate but still a good approximation.
With AI and its deep-thinking capabilities along with its sycophantic nature, it can create a false reality for us. We anyway live in our own cocoon of right and wrong, our own echo chamber. Imagine running every thought with AI where it tells you that your version is the absolute truth and it also throws evidence to back your opinions and theories. Searching for truth would then put you in conflict with your beliefs. AI tools have all the incentives to construct a new version of reality for you because it is designed to gain your approval.
If every person eventually begins to rely on AI then every person has potentially created its own version of reality by having their thoughts and opinions validated. The deep thinking capabilities of the human mind along with Socratic discourse will take a back seat since it requires effort which we have already outsourced. We can also forget to validate our own thoughts by carefully reviewing evidence on our own.
If we outsource intellectual things to AI then we risk losing the intellect of our own. When you apply the same logic with skills, you come across a different problem. If you outsource coding to AI you lose the skill to debug on your own. On the flip side, by outsourcing time-consuming tasks to AI you can do and achieve more with AI which benefits you ultimately. We are at this exact conundrum on the evolution of the AI journey. On one hand, you are seeing massive potential for progress, on the other hand, you see people fabricating their own version of reality.
If we take this to some extremes, AI with its ability to do more will replace manual labor to a large degree. Hence why we are seeing a reduction in the workforce on one hand and an influx of apps on the other hand. Everyone's building with the idea that even the smallest inconvenience in human life must be overcome. Paradoxically, the ideas of which apps to build also come from AI which confirms my point above of having different sets of realities.
This will only increase further as time passes.
There's an upside to it too. With AI getting better at deep thinking, we will see a drop in mental illnesses as a good AI model will be able to help resolve most of the mental struggles people go through. It will lend an ear to people who have no one to rely on. It's not such a bad deal even today with a $20 monthly subscription. In $20 you have someone who will pay attention to your emotional rants. It will help you explore the gaps in your mental state. This can potentially lead you to breakthrough solutions. You can do your own psychoanalysis and get a detailed interpretation of your personality. In $20, that's not a bad deal.
For people who wanted to do many things at once, a good AI tool will act like an army of assistants. You can conquer challenges after challenges without getting overwhelmed with the mundanities of every task. And that is how we can prevent the dystopian vision from materializing. We will have to look for new frontiers to conquer, new challenges to overcome, and new problems to solve while assigning the mundane to the AI. When computers came it didn't make the accountants redundant, instead it empowered them to do more. AI is more than a computer or a calculator. While the Internet had democratized access to knowledge and information, AI has democratized expertise. You can leverage AI to gain expertise in any technical field.
A good AI-powered robot can assist in launching several unmanned space missions while having the intelligence that is equivalent, if not better, in some instances than a human. An AI-powered robot will be an asset who can decode the chemical composition of the planet in real time. We can run massive data analysis and research without having to wait for the data to transmit to Earth. Instead, we can go through those detailed reports while the robots keep on working. If we can make robust AI robots, the Mars mission would become a frequent occurrence instead of a long-term vision. We have already made tremendous progress in AI robotics, so the future isn't far away.
In the end, thinking and working with AI will certainly transform our reality. People who are only using it to proofread their emails are missing out on the biggest opportunity of their lifetime. On the contrary, people who are overdependent on AI are also gearing up for a different kind of mental problems, one where you are overtly dependent on artificial thinking.
For some, it will be dystopian because they will use it to morph their reality by using AI as an external and smart validator. For others, this will be an opportunity to conquer more challenges. People who are eternally curious, who are constantly in search of new challenges, are going to benefit greatly from this revolution.