Have you looked around lately and noticed that artificial intelligence (AI) is seemingly everywhere?? With every day that passes AI is being used in more places, from taking orders at fast-food restaurants, to summarizing Google searches so you don’t have to bother. In fact, students now regularly use programs like Chat GPT to help (complete?) school assignments, and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. As we use AI more regularly, it is important to look at the macro-changes to the human experience that come with such ease of information acquisition — in other words, is all of this good? While AI certainly makes things more convenient, it also makes us more passive, lazy, and arguably more uninformed. While AI might provide answers to us quickly, AI does not always get it right, and rarely understands the nuance of information beyond rote definitions. Still, millions of people each day use AI with unconditional confidence, and as information is accumulated rarely take the time to truly understand what they have gathered. In the immediate future, humans will do less thinking on their own and more relying on AI, leaving us to wonder what impact this will have on mental health, and overall human development?
The dark side of modern technology conveniences
These days you do not even need to leave your couch to talk to friends, stream live events, order pizza, and even meet future romantic partners by means of dating apps. Recent technology advances have seemingly made our lives easier, but there are side effects that may not be in clear sight just yet. Take for example AI, and how so many tasks can be completed in mere seconds that just a few years ago would have taken hours, and possibly days. While we benefit from the speed of AI, not all of the information we acquire is accurate, leading to unforeseen problems.
The greater concerns for AI as they apply to humans goes far beyond an erroneous AI query, as there are deeper human development concerns we should begin talking about. For example, before AI if you wanted to redecorate your house you would need to sit down and think, explore options with your partner, examine costs, work out potential conflicts, and possibly even meet with designers. As you figured out your next steps, you used important life skills to communicate, delegate, resolve disagreements, and explore other efficient ideas. Today, you can simply upload a photo of your house and within moments AI will generate all the ideas you need, as well as links to purchase what AI suggests! Yes, this may be a silly example, but what other life skills and ways that we interact with one another will begin to fade and disappear as we more regularly lean into AI, and steer away from real interactions with other humans?
As AI continues to be used as a resource at every turn, it is important to ask what talents and abilities are we losing as a result? If the neuroplasticity theory of “use it or lose it” is true, then we should begin worrying about the many invaluable life skills we “use” daily to help us thrive as humans that we might “lose” when we no longer have to communicate and problem solve with other humans.
Need to write a resume? Why bother trying to sort all that out on your own when AI can whip up a resume in seconds? Need a new webpage for your business? Or a media kit? Or just about anything else relating to getting your idea off the ground? No need to seek experts or pay to listen to them, not when AI is right there to help. As AI continues to do more for humans every day, we may want to pay closer attention to the impact on our cognition as a direct result. As AI works for us, we become complacent, and there will be a long-term cost from trading our unique human efforts and ingenuity in exchange for immediate AI answers to our problems.
Final thoughts
We are still in the fun stage of AI, regularly plugging in new queries to see what AI will produce. Experts tell us that AI will become more robust as usage increases, prompting bigger questions around what these advances will do to the human race? What skills, abilities, and genetic traits of ours will be altered for the worst when we no longer have to think, and only have to ask AI for answers? While this might sound crazy now, the trend is already moving full-speed ahead and will have a major effect on how we grow and develop as humans in the future.
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