cognitive decline and the feeling of power
I would like the speculate. There is an old story from Isaac Asimov, The Feeling of Power, which I’ve referenced in these pages before. In a (perhaps not so) far future, people have outsourced their ability to do basic calculations to the machines, and the story is about the rediscovery of how to do arithmetic by hand.
Why does this story come to mind now? I’ve seen stories coming up on my various feeds and in various magazines, about how the use of what we misleading call Artificial Intelligence (AI) for such things as essay writing might be associated with some level of cognitive decline. The basic idea is that if we don’t have to do the thinking to pull together an essay, then that part of our brain will atrophy a bit.
From what reading I’ve done, these investigations are in their early days, but the brain is an efficient organism. Evolution has shaped it to be so, and so if there are things that the brain doesn’t need to do, then the brain may not hold onto the ability to do them. Perhaps, just perhaps, the brain behaves like the rest of our bodies, where muscles might lose their strength and definition if not used.
So what, one might say. One reason is that we might not always have the machines on our side. And yes, while the Skynet apocalypse is something that is never far from my imagination, there are also more mundane problems. What if we don’t have the tool handy when we need it? But my concern is larger.
I work in education. I have done so for enough decades that I’m not entirely comfortable admitting just how many. The human brain is a remarkable thing, The imaginative power of the human brain can be spectacular, as we can see with the novel we can’t put down, the twist in the movie we hadn’t and couldn’t imagine. But the strength of that human brain requires training and regular exercise.
There are things that I suspect the human brain will not be able to cope on its own. It’s doing remarkably well at present, and I take heart from browsing mathematical journals and seeing the work people are doing. Reading the New Scientist or Scientific American and seeing what work people are doing. Listing to podcasts such as the Quanta Magazine podcasts or Night Science, and hearing about the work people are doing.
I have no issue with humans making use of the tools they can build. Yes, this does lead us into the labyrinth of the Toolmaker Koan, one of those touchstones I keep coming back to, again and again. But as the Koan teaches us, the rate of increase of the power of the tools is far faster than the rate of increase in our ability to use our tools wisely, and so we have work to do.
multijimbo 