Thoughts, now 50% off

How AI could indirectly threaten mental well-being

There’s been a lot of articles and reporting around AI lately and a large part of that has come about because of ChatGPT. How it passed a law school exam, or an MBA exam. And while these feats are impressive, I’m always amazed at humanity’s inability to pump the brakes and ask “to what end will this technology take us?”

The history of technology shows us that we, humans, are always impressed by how new tools give reasonable efficiency compared to where we were yesterday without them. Drinking from a cup is easier and more efficient than cupping our hands. Intentionally planting a lot of food seeds, or farming, seems easier and more efficient than randomly finding whatever foods we can to survive.

But even if you’ve not the read the Tao, you’ll recognize that life is full of dualities, full of yin and yang. Planting crops is a fabulous idea and agriculture has enabled millions more people to be fed. But even that comes at a cost to the human body itself, as our jaws adapted to the softer foods and shrank, creating the modern need for braces.

Cups and farming are old technologies, and while our thoughts and ideas are forever changed by them, they aren’t dynamically changed by them. Because these technologic tools aren’t tools of communication, they live a rather static existence now in terms of human change.

Let’s look at more modern, communication-based technologies.

Talk to me, Goose

When you want to contact a family member or friend, do you hand-write a letter to mail them? Do you stop by their house in-person to see if, by chance, they are home to talk? Most of the time, the answer is no. You text, email, direct message on some platform, or call them. You want a reasonably efficient way to convey your information to them. And that’s because we’ve been changed by the telegraph.

The telegraph created something that the human mind had never encountered: a technology that dynamically, and in nearly real-time from which it was sent, changed the thoughts and ideas of its recipients. Where newspapers delivered those changes on a fixed schedule, the telegraph could jolt a town instantaneously.

While our minds became accustomed (addicted) to this idea of instant communication at a distance, we didn’t realize the cost. We were starting a long and steep journey of trading speed for quality - personal connection.

This trade has now revealed a very evident truth that modern communication is cheapened communication, literally and figuratively. In the past, people held physical letters from friends for decades, sometimes their whole lives. Books have been printed with collections of letters from Vincent Van Gogh, Henry James, and countless more. And the beauty of these physical copies making it into book form is that they are published after the death of the authors. So their revelation comes at no cost to the parties involved (hard to have feelings when you’re dead), and as a benefit to humanity. It’s almost like a built-in copyright expiration.

Nowadays, with text and email and apps like snapchat, communication is gone as quickly as it is sent, or it's at least buried by the volumes of other communication. These forms of communication are cheap, so there is a lot of it. Our exchanges (mine anyway) are predominantly transactional (could you grab milk? did you hear about x?) rather than intentional (I want to tell you about that I’ve been giving thought to x). There will be little, if any, posthumous communication for our descendants. More importantly, these technologies changed not just the way we communicate with one another, but how we even think about communicating.

AI’s (in)direct hit

And so that takes us back to AI. As outlined by the technologies above, from faming to snapchat, technology’s threat to humanity is never the direct hit. “Technology will take our jobs” has been an empty slogan for decades, if not centuries. Rather, the threat is more subtle and indirect, but still vaguely predictable.

Just as the phone and email and SMS cheapened communication, AI will cheapen thinking. But what does this mean?

Well, in a previous article I talked about the loss of curiosity as a casualty of smartphones and the internet, a combination which is not artificial but augmented intelligence. But augmentation is the current focus of AI, where these tools help make us more reasonably efficient. Like Github’s Copilot which helps write code but a human is still “in charge” of what gets written. Or ChatGPT which can help me learn a language or bake bread or pass an exam in a class I have no business passing or who the hell knows what else.

So I would posit that other casualties of AI or augmentation will be the ability to research a topic in depth, the ability to think critically, the inclination to take risks, and ultimately, creativity. Because all of these are interlinked.

Researching a topic often leads to off-shooting areas of focus, rabbit holes that yield surprising gems and unlikely connections. By asking ChatGPT for some research, we will get a “good enough to pass” answer, and the transaction is all that’s valued. That answer won’t involve critical thought by the receiver, but rather, critical care to try to make sure they aren’t plagiarizing or saying something obviously wrong. This inability to critically think makes the human unlikely to make good decisions in situations where there is an absence of information, and so they are less likely to take risks. And when you’re less likely to take risks, you’re less likely to get out of your comfort zone to do something creative.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. If we approach technology with mindfulness about the habits and skills we still need to cultivate as biological creatures, then we can still live very fulfilling lives that also benefit our descendants. But as long as we remain focused on the hysteria of job loss or the direct hits of technology, we won’t stand a chance until it’s too late.

I’m going to write some letters now.