As Artificial Intelligence tools become more pervasive, I wonder about the impact on ‘real’ intelligence.
Sixteen years ago, Nicholas Carr had an article in The Atlantic entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.
I have referenced that article a few times on these pages. It came to mind this past weekend as I watched a segment of CBS Sunday Morning by David Sedaris. “The way you talk to a person says a lot about you, of course, but so, too, does the way you talk to a device.”
I rarely drive anywhere without using the Waze app on my phone to get real-time traffic updates. As a result, who needs to rely on “traffic on the ones” from the local news radio? In the past, I maintained a mental phone directory of hundreds of numbers. Now, voice commands mean I no longer need to commit phone numbers or addresses to my prefrontal cortex and hippocampus.
For most of the past two months, I had youthful visitors who enjoyed driving Alexa crazy with requests like, “Alexa, play Baby Shark”, and “Alexa, what is the weather today?” Of course, Alexa couldn’t be driven crazy; that privilege was reserved for just the owner. My wife insisted on the kids adding “please” and “thank-you” to the requests in the hope they would develop some useful skills when dealing with real-life assistants. (As though Alexa cared.)
Despite the availability of a wide variety of screens to entertain 5 kids ranging in age from 10 months to 10 years, down-time was often spent reading books. Real, old-fashioned paper books. Each of the kids had their own book bag of curated titles, restocked a few times through the summer. The bags were adorned with Canadian imagery, as part of my wife’s not-so-subliminal campaign to get the kids to move back home.
I appreciate the efficiencies of the latest AI tools.
We have to marvel at the possibilities enabled by advancements in Artificial Intelligence. And, I often think back to working at Bell Labs with some of the people who created the basics for what is now coming to market.
But, I also wonder about the impact of Artificial Intelligence on ‘real’ intelligence. What will be the impact of these technologies on our abilities to develop the next wave of advancements?
Are our minds made stronger by a foundation in classical education methods? As kids head back to school, do we still need to maintain focus on the old-fashioned 3-Rs: reading, writing and ‘rithmetic?