Sometimes technology truly does propel us humans forward, pushing the boundaries on what was and is possible and moving us into a new reality. Other times, it is a mere trade, one thing for another. This technological development is something new, and so masquerades as progress. But it leaves us with a net zero gain, and therefore hardly progresses us as the term seems to imply.

I am trying to sift through all the good and the bad in Artificial Intelligence to find whether this is a technology worth adopting or is something that is better left alone. At least for the common individual.

One of the thoughts that has been presented to me is the idea of thoughts themselves. That our thinking is formed by language, and if AI is now doing most of the thinking and talking then our language will degrade and thereby our thinking degrades. Suddenly we are primarily a culture formed by AI slop videos (which by the way are occasionally quite funny).

Socrates felt like this once. He believed that the written word would be bad news for the human mind, that intelligence would dip, and that memory would be decimated. At the time, most things were memorized. But writing did become popular, and memorization and verbal communication shared space with this new form. Did our minds grow weaker or stronger by the new medium? I am sure a bit of both. Memory certainly changed but new faculties emerged as important with the new medium.

In The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, he would argue that this digital medium is not one of equal benefit, but a negative trade. The evidence is in our attention span, in our time management, and in our loss of meaning.

What we lose with AI

Friction is good in thinking and in language formation. If you would like to become a better writer or speaker, you have to spend time formulating patterns of communication and word formulation. That means fumbling along sometimes, sparring with other communicators, and pushing our boundaries of knowledge and usage.

When we use AI, we lose a lot of this early friction. We offload the thinking onto a bot who is able to give us a vanilla communication roughly communicating what we wanted to say. We wouldn’t know if it says everything we want it to say because we haven’t thought the thought through to its inevitable end. We are not sure whether the conclusion is the one we want, or if it was said in the way we want because we hadn’t thought it through.

Our writing and our speaking loses its flavor and takes on a monotone. I want my writing to sound like me, my speeches to be authentically mine. What else would be the point of participating in communication?

What we gain with AI

There is no tool like it that aides me in getting deeper into a thought I am having. I can run any idea into the AI bot and it can decipher my logical fallacies, where my strongest points are, and what I can strengthen.

It also allows me to research in more depth at a quicker pace. I no longer have to spend so much time looking for sources, instead I can look into the sources it is directing me towards to find what might be useful.

A loss for words

There is anecdotal evidence that AI is impacting our ability to think, to use and find words, and to communicate ideas effectively. This “evidence” I am referring to is simply what people are posting, which is not very scientific.

But it does point to this idea of AI impacting our thinking, and that many people are recognizing the potential impact it may have.

If AI takes over language usage to the point where our language becomes degraded, then our thinking will also be degraded.

We should treat AI as a tool for our betterment as humans. AI is a wonderful servant and a terrible master. At this moment, it is in your hands for what you will use it for.

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