Is AI making us stupid?

Catching a new report from MIT, there are clear indications that AI is making us stupid. We no longer internalise data and detail, we delegate it. The fact that the Alpha Gen can get all their school reports written by robots and teachers cannot tell the difference, is evidence that this is the way we are moving. Is that sad? I think so, and here’s why.

Humans are meant to have purpose and are one of the only animals on Earth with forward thinking. All other animals don’t worry about tomorrow. They focus on now and the moment. Only humans think about ten, twenty, thirty years from now, imho.

The question is how can we change the future if we stop thinking?

The MIT study finds that 83.3% of the ChatGPT users couldn't remember any quote from essays that they wrote minutes earlier. They just write something, hit save, and their brain has forgotten it because ChatGPT did the thinking. This is concerning.

Bearing in mind that I have young children (nine years old), we must nurture thinking. Every day, I give my children questions, tests and challenges to enrich their thinking. It is not A, B, C tests or tests that mark, but tests that challenge their thinking. What do you think about this? Is the world getting better or worse, and why? Would you rather live on Mars or Earth? … stuff like that as they can learn all the boring stuff at school.

But when they become teenagers, will they delegate all of their homework to AI and just play videogames? Will they still think or become dumb ducks?

It almost feels like we have reached a tipping point between human innovation and progress and technological takeover and regress. We will no longer drive cars or pilot planes soon. We will no longer need to write or create soon. Our media, news, movies and content will all be hand delivered on a personalised plate by AI. We will no longer have to think.

MIT finds that there is a 47% reduction in brain connectivity in ChatGPT user’s brains. If your computer lost half its processing power, you'd call it broken. That's what's happening to ChatGPT user’s brains. They have stopped thinking.

Personal opinion: there are three things that make humans completely different: thinking, curiosity and wonderment.

I think, therefore I am;

Curiosity killed the cat but we are curious consistently to find out what is happening tomorrow; and

Wonderment is that sense of reveal. We find something new and, because we think and are curious, we imagine what it means. We have a thrill about tomorrow.

We think, therefore we are.

What really got me about the MIT study is that they found students who were forced to write essays without AI performed worse than people who never used AI. This is not surprising. After all humans who do thing without AI will always underperform when faced with humans who use AI. The thing is that is should not stop us thinking. It should not stop use being curious. It should not stop us having wonder.