AI will make us dumber, until we get smarter

There is a popular negative view on Artificial Intelligence right now. The idea is that the more AI does for us, the less we will be able to do for ourselves. We will become the people in Wall-E, staring at screens all day, unable to think or move.

It sounds plausible. But people said the same things about smartphones, TVs or cars. They assume humans are passive spectators, living history like a downhill.

When cars were invented, we would have been quick to predict that the human legs would atrophy and disappear. And for a brief period, in the late 20th century, it looks like we might be right. We drove everywhere. We sat on couches. We got fat.

But then something strange happened. We invented jogging.

To a caveman, jogging is absurd. You run in circles, going nowhere. It’s running without purpose. But because cars removed the exercise out of transportation, we reintroduced it back as a conscious act. I am a perfect example. I have a treadmill under my standing desk I use every day.

Régis Debray has a nice way to put this. Humanity has a “counter-adaptive” nature: each technical step forward means a compensating step backward in our mindsets. The “archaism” of modernity. I suspect this is also why engineers in Silicon Valley, building the future, are the most obsessed with Paleo diet and rock climbing.

The result is that we are physically fitter now than we were before the car.

Today, anyone with a $40 gym subscription willing to put efforts gets in better shape than the average person from the 1800s. We have coaches all around the world studying what is the most fastest and most efficient way to build strength, endurance and mobility. We replaced the caveman’s natural lifestyle with the optimized exercises. We measured macros, biomechanics and VO2 max. Fitness became a science.

And the output is accessible: Everyone knows people running the New York City Marathon for fun. I have three friends who completed an Iron Man, one of them started from scratch 8 months before.

I suspect the same thing will happen with our brains.

Right now, we are in the dip. TV made us passive. The internet outsourced our memory. And now AI handles execution, from writing a strategic email to generating a poster.

People are right about the short term impact: we are going to become very dumb.The average person will lose their basic skills of logic and creativity.

But just as we missed moving, we will miss thinking. And if our daily life doesn’t provide the heavy lifting anymore, we will build something that can. A cognitive gym.

We are already seeing the early signs. There are people who compete in memory championships, memorizing thousands of digits of pi through techniques like “mind palace”. Today, this looks like a nerdy outlier activity. But in the future, it will normalize.

What does a cognitive gym look like? I don’t think we know yet.

If you ask anyone how to get strong legs, they will know the answer: squats. But if you ask them how to get a strong brain, they will stare at you blankly. We don’t know how to train creativity. We don’t even have a standard definition or unit of measurement.

Right now, “improving your mind” feels like “getting in shape” in the 1950, with vague advice about fresh air and calisthenics. But eventually, we will identify the “muscles” behind logic and creativity. We will develop training programs with exercises and reps. We will move from natural intelligence to cultivated intelligence.

It is hard for people to be optimistic because we are currently in that awkward middle phase, where technology has made us weak and we are still adapting. But we should not be worried.

Soon we won’t be just walking. We’ll be running.