Don’t Fear AI — See You In The Mind Gym

I have been concerned – well actually freaked out – about how AI has the potential to truly destroy us.  I am not talking in this Dialog about the Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator movies – although that also is a risk — I am talking about how AI will greatly impair — and for many of us end — the need for human thought, as we increasingly just ask ChatGpt or Gemini or one of the other AI Apps.

I wrote a Dialog calling this the impending AI-Pocolypse coming for us, which highlights this risk.  Here is a link to that article — https://thebruceprojects.com/averting-the-ai-pocalypse/ — which highlights the essence of the risk.

But as I despaired, I realized I was missing something big, which gave me hope that there could be a rainbow at the end of these AI clouds.  Let me show you what I mean…

First, let me reprint the part of my AI-Pocolypse article that treats on this subject:

AI Causing Loss of Ability to Think:

The fourth concern deriving from The AI-Pocolypse is about what AI will potentially do to our brains.
The problem is that those who don’t use AI as a useful tool today are downright foolish; however, those who overuse AI will become foolish. In other words, AI is a wonderful servant but a bad master.
Let me explain what I mean with a little more depth….

Right now if you have a brain that has polished the ability to think – typically that means you are grown up and able to think for yourself adequately – then you would be foolish not to use AI in the things that you do. For pretty much any goal or task that you have to accomplish – even if you are an expert –AI allows you to essentially poll every single person on the planet (who is on the internet) and ask each of them if they have ways to improve on what you are doing or make it more efficient or double check if you missed something. With this tool at your fingertips, you would be foolish not to take the 60 seconds to ask an AI program to double check things for matters of importance. That is what AI currently does exceptionally well – it assembles pretty much all human thinking on the subject in question, summarizes it for you, and gives you additional ideas to boot.

I would think that of course you would do use AI for this function. And if you haven’t started to do this yet, sooner or later you will I am sure. I am an authority here since I am (always) the last adopter of technology – I probably had the last Blackberry pried from my hands before I gravitated to the iPhone. And if even Bruce is using AI in the manner I outlined above, then everyone else is or will be soon.

This is what I mean when I say that you would be foolish not to use AI.
However, let’s say you don’t have a brain that has (yet) achieved the ability to think. Maybe you are a young kid – or maybe not even born yet. As you grow up you could either:

• Figure something out for yourself
• Or ask the AI program the answer

The easiest path will be to ask the AI program, obviously. I mean you just have to ask and it will tell you. This will mean that you are not thinking – or learning to think — but letting the AI program think for you. You don’t need me to point out that unless you do something about it, this will atrophy your brain or cause its development to be stunted.

And this will be awfully hard to avoid won’t it?

Let’s say you are adamant that you want to figure things out for yourself, i.e. you want to resist the urge to fall into the non-thinking comfort zone everyone else is in. You want to be a true thinker and develop your brain, so you fight the programming.

Consider all the pressures against you. Others are whipping through their homework while you plod along. Others are essentially laughing at you as a turtle while they race ahead. You are sitting with an old-fashioned thing called a book while they are outside playing. You are learning to think, you say, but more and more times it doesn’t matter that you can think, since all your friends are easily out-thinking you with their machinery.

And it is even worse in your career or job, where typically the pressures are to achieve tasks by a deadline. What company would tolerate your taking a ton of extra time for you to figure things out for yourself when it could be done much quicker using an AI program. AI would be the antithesis of competitive behavior.

You would have to have the will of an adamant to resist these pressures.

And my belief is that virtually no one will be able to do this, as after a while it will be irrational to do so.

So – for us oldsters – and even older kids in their early twenties – AI is a God-send. It will open us up to all sorts of things we could never dream of achieving. It is the greatest tool ever.

But for those younger it has a severe risk of crippling the next generation. And, unchecked, it will cripple each generation thereafter worse and worse.

Here is the title of an article: “How I Realized AI Was Making Stupid – and What I Do Now. Backers of the new tech say it will free us to be creative, but studies show that avoiding mental effort can cause your brain to atrophy.”

And another one: “AI’s Biggest Threat: Young People Who Can’t Think.”

Putting all this in a nutshell and as pithily as possible: AI is a wonderful servant (to those who already know how to think, create and be human) but a terrible master (to those who haven’t developed these skills or don’t have the drive to create them).

As an example, if want to find the cube root of 11,700,000, I know if I spend a few hours I could probably find a way to figure it out, but instead I asked Google, which told me in about one second:

227.018868065

Since I was writing this article, I double checked – multiplying that number out three times — and Google was right.

So I probably saved a solid half hour – or maybe more – using AI as a servant to figure this out. Plus I am guessing that even if I had a few hours I couldn’t have figure it out to 8 decimal places.

As a less simple example, I can now ask AI to write year-end reviews of lawyers in my law firm, give me business plans for new business ideas, and pretty much anything I want. I think of AI as (sort of) a way to ask all of humanity for its input on just about any question. And it saves me a lot of time. And since I am a deep thinker at heart, this is wonderful as it expands what I can do – what I can create – and what I can achieve. What a wonderful teammate AI is. Woohoo!

So for us oldsters, who already know how to think, AI will be a tonic, but for younger people – i.e. the future of humanity – AI will gradually turn them into people who cannot. So sad. So awful. So terrible.

But then it hit me. Things are not as bleak as I thought……

Hearken back to hundreds of years ago. A man had to be fit enough to traipse through the jungle to trap and kill his meat. And a woman, back at the house, had to be fit enough to be able to do backbreaking work, including hand-washing the laundry in a cold tub of water, chopping wood to keep the home fires burning, etc.

Today, the man and the woman have an App whereby they order in food from literally hundreds of restaurants that will bring it right to their door, their heat magically comes through the walls, and you can send your laundry out for cleaning if you like. So a man or a woman can be completely sedentary and hardly even stand up to solve all of what had to be done the hard way years ago and have a perfectly good life.

But if you do that – i.e. rely on society to serve your physical needs – and just sit there, you become fat and unhealthy and get all sorts of illnesses and likely die younger.

So what do some – but not all – people do?

They go to the gym!!!!!

Or they go for a walk. Or they play sports. Or they force themselves to have physical activity to avoid the downside of sitting around.

Indeed, sitting around and ordering your food plus going to the gym for a hard workout is overall a lot better for your health and longevity than tromping through the jungle to trap a deer or spending the backbreaking work doing the laundry in a cold tub of water in the winter.

Now instead of being forced to trap our game and do the laundry by hand we can optimize our lives by sitting by while others do the stuff we don’t want to do but also going to the gym to keep ourselves healthy. Things are a lot better than they were for sure.

And then it hit me! That is the answer to the AI-Pocolypse!

The next iteration of humanity will have this same choice. We can sit around and let the AI do our thinking and learning and become unhealthy blobs of intellectual jelly.

Or we can go to what I would call the Mind Gym – although it could use a better nickname.

There are all sorts of concepts here as you start to think about it. Maybe for the Mind Gym you go to an empty room with your teacher. Instead of it being a yoga teacher in leotards, it is a thinking teacher, the room is bereft of all technical stuff, and you exercise by doing mind-numbingly difficult problems or creating beautiful things using just your brain.

Then – drum roll – instead of having AI atrophy your brainpower, it augments it.

And there is another positive aspect to this. Consider what many believe is the biggest infirmity of school and teaching nowadays? It is the rote learning that may blast some information into our skulls – for purposes of passing specific tests — but is almost the antithesis of thinking and reasoning. This new learning process that avoids AI help will cure that problem since the whole point is thinking rather the forced memorization.

So to conclude – my prediction for the future – actually now at least moderately optimistic – is that just like the differences between those who are physically fit and those who allow themselves to become physically unhealthy, we will evolve to humans who are either intellectually fit or intellectually unhealthy. And just like for physicality, this intellectual health (or not) will be tethered to how much and how hard we work out.

Although I am now less negative about AI than I was, I don’t want to move us fully into euphoria, since this won’t necessarily hit nirvana for us humans, since those who are intellectually unhealthy will have some real problems finding uses (dare I say jobs) for themselves, i.e. the dichotomy between those who are intellectually healthy and those who are not will be pretty bleak. But even with this outcome, I am a lot more positive now about the future of humanity and AI than I was before I wrote this.

Maybe the AI-Pocolypse won’t destroy humanity’s ability to think after all.

See you in the Mind Gym.

Bruce

The Bruce Philosophical Project