Latest / Humanity Working / Is AI Actually Making Us Dumber?

Transcript

Is AI Actually Making Us Dumber? · Humanity Working

• 0:14
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome back, Paul.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_02: We are up on uh your next question two of the seven big questions about AI.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um is AI making us dumber?
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: And uh this is an incredibly uh useful question at the moment uh as as we hear how AI is going to solve all of our problems and take all of our jobs.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um tell me a little bit about what inspired you to write this this uh question too and and what you discovered most interesting.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, hello Matt.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_01: Hello, everybody.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um for folks that are coming new to these these questions, we're looking at some of the larger questions that emerged from uh having written the book, The AI Ready Human, and then um talking about the book, and and these are sort of collections of things that have come up in discussions or questions people have asked me as as we've been doing our virtual and physical book tour.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: And um this one has come up a lot.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um which is there's there's sort of like the theoretical well, is it making us dumber?
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_01: Which I guess is the new uh the new version of the dumbing down of our society concern that has existed for uh for a long period of time.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_01: But then, rather interestingly, I would say not everybody, um, but I would say about 20 to 30% of people that I've spoken to about this topic aren't just concerned that it's making other people dumber, but they're concerned that it's making them dumber.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: They're seeing some they're seeing some changes in their own behaviors that are concerning to them.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I can think of things that well, I'll I'll tell you things that people have mentioned to me.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: So things like, oh, I I do some work, um, maybe I write a paper or I do some research in the workplace, and it's quite detailed research.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I use AI to help me, and then somebody will ask me about that research the next day, and I can't even it's like I never even did it.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's sort of like it's the the work that I did didn't make me smarter, it just flowed through me in some way, um, and wasn't having any it didn't appear to be having any impact on me in terms of what I knew or what I uh what I understood.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: And then I've had other people as well who related to that have expressed some concern that it appears to be impacting their memory, um uh it appears to be impacting their ability to focus.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um I've spoken to some people who have shared with me that they'll be uh they'll have those those tabs that you and I have spoken about before, they'll have those, you know, that those various tabs open and uh they will find that when a let's say a tab unexpectedly closes down and they were working in that tab, they'll open the tab up again and they will have lost immediately, like the moment the tab closes down, they'll have immediately forgotten what it was they were working on in the tab.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like it's like their holding memory for the work they're doing has just completely disappeared.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: And so these have been the long conversations because if you think about it, right, that's very close to what it feels like to be not just human but valuable and effective and so on.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: If you feel like you you're actually unable to do your work without the help of AI, and somehow it's turning you into a less proficient human being, that can be very worrying.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so I think this is why the the topic has has come up so much and why we decided that um that that it was a good idea to to use as one of these these questions.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's really that's really what led to it.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_02: So tell me a little bit about you mentioned in in the article the the Flynn effect and how that impacts this uh conversation.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: I suppose before getting into that I should say what I mean by intelligence.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I for the purposes of this work, I looked at it as um the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: So that's quite a big bucket of things that come under intelligence.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_01: That is actually probably the most agreed upon definition of intelligence.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: Now, um, as I mentioned in the article, um I do think that that's probably unhelpfully narrow, uh, because it doesn't encapsulate all aspects of valuable thinking and acting, including ones that are pretty human.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_05: Right.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um so you know it's that there's nothing in there, for example, about creativity.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I do think that there are challenges with that definition, but the advantage of that kind of definition is that you can you can measure it uh fairly well and you can see what happens to those measurements over time.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: And so for years, our um understanding of intelligence was largely governed by the work that was done uh on school test scores, um, and our early understanding of intelligence looked at things like um were people performing well on certain subjects versus performing poorly in other subjects.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: Because you may not it's difficult to kind of go back in time and think about this, but there would have been a logical argument to say that the brain only has so much attention it can pay to things.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you were to look at school kids, if they're good at English, they're going to be bad at math because they've only got so much intelligence to direct in different places, right?
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, or you could look at school tests and go, well, maybe they they will actually be, rather than one subject being negatively colorated with another subject, maybe they'll be positively correlated because maybe there will be people that are less intelligent that will do poorly in all of them, and more intelligent that will do bit better in all of them.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_01: And eventually we get to a point where there's sort of like a weak correlation between the two, and then there's this concept of this thing called IQ or the intelligence quotient, and people get this idea of being, you know, of somebody being slightly more intelligent, one party being slightly more intelligent than another party.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: Once you start doing that, once you start measuring that, you can now then start measuring what happens to it over time.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: And for the longest time, people thought that you were just there was just like a base level of intelligence.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, a lot of people think that today.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like you'll hear hundred, an IQ of 100 is like average intelligence.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_01: But what that misses is that actually there is drift over time.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so for many, many years, we were able to measure a steady increase in human intelligence across many different countries.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: And so the same work repeated in all kinds of different uh all kinds of different settings.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of people begin that believe that was due to access to additional information, uh, the opening up and democratizing of uh of education, uh, but also related to things like nutrition, overall well-being that people had that was increasing, and as that was happening, the measures of intelligence were uh were increasing.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's the Flynn effect.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: It was it would continue.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: And once this was discovered, because it appeared to be related to these things like access to additional information and overall nutrition and wellness, the assumption was for many that this would continue almost indefinitely.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: But that actually hasn't happened.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um these same studies that were looking at overall intelligence and saw it increase, um they saw around about um the turn of the century, probably.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um so as we got headed into the 2000s, but it might have been as early as the as the mid to late 90s, the Flynn effect started to go into reverse.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: So, in other words, we as a population, and not just in the US, but we as a population started to become less intelligent versus more intelligent.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: And this has been replicated again across multiple countries uh throughout the world.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: So flint effect, population increase over time of intelligence, reverse flint effect, um, population decrease of intelligence over time.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_01: It's not uniform across all measures of intelligence, but that broadly and largely is what has been happening.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_02: It corresponds directly with the advent of reality television, I believe.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: It does.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: And and you know, it's funny.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: There are different people who have a lot of different theories as to why this is the case.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you can look at that, you can look at social media.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um there is the uh there is this sort of generalized concept of dumbing down, Flynn himself, um who by the way wasn't the very first person to spot this, it just ended up being named after him later.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um But uh Flynn himself does believe that that um that dumbing down is a um is is part of what is going on here.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: Dumbing down of society, if you like, um, is part of what's going on here, but um we don't know.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_01: We don't know exactly why this is happening, but we do know that it is.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_02: So a couple things come to mind, and and one is that uh something you said about the the act of the act of learning kind of disappearing in terms of uh you you learned it but not really, and you just close the tab and it's gone.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_02: Um how much of the impact of AI, especially, is maybe just an acceleration of those same traits without AI?
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_02: Like we like we poured gas on the fire of something that was already happening, which was we were not needing to work as hard to learn things.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's a really good question.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um the one thing that I would point out to people is there is a difference between getting things done and learning things.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: And the two in a world where you in a world where you were naturally limited in the speed with which you could get things done, you were you could get a lot of learning along the way.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: So if you ask me to build a boat, um I've got and let's let's say you ask me to build a wooden boat, right?
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_01: I've got to l I've got to learn a bunch of stuff in order for the boat to get built.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_01: If I'm building the boat.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um and there's not really a huge amount of shortcutting that's gonna go on there, right?
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: I've got to learn those skills of uh of woodworking, and I've also got to understand the dynamics of you know what's gonna cause the boat to sink or or not.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um I've I I'm gonna it's gonna take me time to build up that collection of skills.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: And while that collection of skills is happening, I can be building the boat.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: But if if there was a if you asked me to, I don't know, coordinate a robot that was gonna that was gonna build a boat and use AI to learn all of the things that I needed to do to make sure that the boat didn't sink, then I can shortcut the activity itself, the event itself happening, and do that faster than I would naturally learn.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_01: So we've had traditional education systems whereby knowledge is built up over courses of you know months and years, and then we've had what I would say is the sort of learning by doing stuff that happens at work, which is also happening over courses of months and years, because in order to be able to do it, I have to actually learn it.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: And now, without thinking about it, really, we've kind of decoupled the two.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: So the thing itself can be built super fast, and we can attempt to learn at the same pace, but our brains aren't accustomed to learning at that speed.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so this is more than just a fire hose, right?
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: This is like a this is like a flood that arrives it's like a flash flood, right?
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: It comes, it arrives, and it and and it leaves.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: And hopefully we pick up something while that is happening, but we're not learning in the same way that we would.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: So I think this sort of decoupling thing that has gone on here that is causing uh something of a challenge for us.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: And yeah, you said something there that's interesting, because just because you can find the answer quickly doesn't necessarily prevent you from going down the rabbit hole.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_02: No.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_02: If you chose to.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: But you'd have to apply old techniques with the new tools.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's not necessarily uh the case for how everyone is is using it in order to get to this place where we have the reverse Flynn effect because it it's uh it's a shortcut and an excuse.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean I think what we're saying here really is that potentially is that while learning by doing remains one of the most effective ways to learn in a business concept uh context, um the decoupling of how much you have to learn in order to do, or I should say, to put it more accurately, um there is a decoupling between the learning piece and the doing piece.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_01: And as a result, the learning piece can be very, very rudimentary.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um that implies, unless we are very conscious about it, and unless we say, I I actually want to learn this.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: How am I going to learn this?
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, it's not going to happen.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas before, it just would have happened.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_01: Go speak to Bob.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_01: He's been in this, you know, he's been working on this for the last six months, he knows all about it.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: Well, now it's not go to speak to Bob, he's been working in this for the last six months, he knows all about it.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: It is, oh, Bob produced this yesterday, maybe he remembers something he did.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: You know.
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the that's the that's the interesting aspect.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's the high-level aspect.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Now there's other stuff as well, and hopefully we'll get to this.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: There are some specific studies that look at specific activities um that uh show other things that are sort of happening at the brain level that um that also indicate some of the challenges associated with this.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, because I I was thinking about uh a rudimentary example of uh when the cell phone first came out and you could reliably start, you know, storing everyone's phone numbers in your phone.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_02: I I stopped remembering phone numbers.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_02: Like it it just but is that something that uh means that we're getting dumber because we don't remember phone numbers, or is it literally just a utilitarian change that made sense?
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_02: And the same might be said for a lot of examples where we do get benefits of shortcut to save cycles for more important things.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_02: But when you combine it with the ability to shortcut everything, like AI has given us, it's almost like too too much to ignore the temptation if you if you understand what I'm saying.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_02: Like I do can you blame us for the shortcut, but we don't realize that we're hurting ourselves on the way.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_02: You know what I'm saying?
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: I I I know exactly what you're saying, and and let's let's go a little deeper on that, because I think it's really important.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um your example of the phone number is one.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: A classic example when I was growing up was the calculator.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I'm old enough to remember the time where there were serious discussions, not just from parents, but in teaching communities and so on, as to whether calculators belonged in the classroom or not.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: And the theory was that if you brought the calculator into the classroom, then you know, people would get really bad at mental arithmetic, and that that was in some way a that was in some way a bad thing.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: And the argument that was made, and the argument that ultimately w ultimately won out, was um that if you freed us up from spending a bunch of our time figuring out how to be really good at metal arithmetic, then we could go deeper into uh into more complex mathematical concepts.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: You know?
• 19:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I understand this, my degree is in mathematics and and you know, we barely touched numbers, right?
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_01: Because once you get into the high-level forms of mathematics, very little of it is a bit is about just the behavior of numbers themselves.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: There's a little bit there, but not but not a lot.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: And even if it is, none of it's really arithmetic, right?
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: Arithmetic is a very basic uh concept that is a foundational concept in mathematics, but is not something that you spend an enormous amount of your time on when you get to the high level.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: So you take these people and you allow them to be able to do much deeper things because you're taking the trivial things that they that they do under underneath it.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: This the heart of this argument is what I call the utility argument.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so you still because the calculator exists and now our phones exist, and you know, we are we are one press away from being able to do anything that requires that, we don't we don't really need it anymore.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so your phone numbers fit into that category, the calculator fits into that category, and so on and so forth.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_01: The ultimate extension of the utility argument is that actually human intelligence doesn't really matter at all, right?
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: Because as AI becomes more and more integrated into our world and is there and is one click away, or you know, we gone all the way to brain computer interfaces that are embedded in us, um we you know, as I put in the article, we can all be more intelligent than Turing without even having to learn to read.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: All because we all have access to it.
• 21:55
  SPEAKER_01: That's the that's the theory.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: If we have access to it and it's always there, then why would we need it?
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um but there is clearly a difference between individual cases, like you say, and then all of those individual cases um coming together with a general purpose form of artificial general intelligence that we don't want or need because it's much easier to rely upon the technology.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: So for people who've seen the movie Wally, it's the that second part of the of the movie WAL-E when they're in the we're in the spaceship.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_01: That's that it's it's that version where effectively we've just become these lazy blobs that don't do anything because the technology does everything.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: That was never an issue when it was individual use cases where we could always move up the stack.
• 22:52
  SPEAKER_01: It is potentially a case once you get into general uh general purpose considerations.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_01: So that is the ultimate part of the utility argument.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I I I think there are strong arguments against the utility argument being the be-all and end all.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean it's it's interesting when and maybe you can chat a little bit about these these uh these studies you're talking about, but it's so recent too.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_02: And it's almost like we we uh the over we might be overblowing it, we might be over-correcting for it, or it might be a trend that that is is uh a one-way downhill.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's really hard to hard to determine, you know, like uh much like uh any other technology that comes on, you start to be, oh, this is gonna ruin, you know, television is gonna ruin everything.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_02: Or social media is gonna ruin everything.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you could argue that we you know we we launched social media not really realizing the impact, and now are we dialing it back at who knows?
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_02: You know, uh so much is happening, it's like a flood of all of these things coming at us um that it feels almost uh overwhelming at times to really speculate where it'll settle in, you know, uh uh like as the mobile phone has settled in as a phone.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 24:41
  SPEAKER_02: But in in regards to all the other things it does, we're still trying to absorb that impact.
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_02: And uh it it is a new uh emerging thing we're trying to figure out.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_02: But we've been Googling things and and giving away our memory for quite a while.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_02: We do have information about that.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and I think the interesting thing, Matt, is most people are not having these conversations.
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean it'll be I'd be curious to know like what proportion of our listeners are even were even aware of the reverse Lynn effect before you know coming into listening to this podcast.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_01: And so it feels to me like something that has been going on in the case of the reverse Flynn effect that has been going on for at least twenty years and possibly thirty.
• 25:46
  SPEAKER_01: We should we should we should decide as a society whether we care about that.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's it's like we can choose to meet it with a shrug, and maybe some people would argue that given our behavior, we do meet it with a shrug.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_01: But I I think many people would be surprised to even understand that generally we that the that there is evidence that we're that we're getting less smart.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: And they might start to think about the fact that that may matter.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: I personally I actually think it does matter.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: I think it matters quite a lot.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um and the flip to that utility argument that I was making is what I call in the article the uniqueness argument.
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: And the heart of the uniqueness argument is that it does matter hugely because human intelligence is of value in its own right and it's fundamentally different to what AI does.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_01: And if you think about it, if we're making a case that um the best case future for a society is one where you've got this amazing power, powerful technology, but you've got human beings guiding it, controlling it, conducting it, determining what it does and where it goes, that kind of implies that the human beings have to be fairly smart.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_01: And and investing in that is really important.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm not and I want to be clear that from my perspective, the argument I'm making here is not saying, oh, that's because education's rubbish.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: Or, you know, that our I'm not I'm not saying the education system has failed us and it's turning people into idiots or anything like that.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: No, I'm not saying that.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm saying the relationship that we have with the world and the technology around us and media and all these various other things, that's creating an environment at a uh a societal level that is impacting us negatively.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: And the studies back that up because they show that this this reverse Flynn effect that I'm talking about is across all demographics, it's across all levels of education, it's across all age groups, right?
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's across all of these things.
• 28:34
  SPEAKER_01: So it shows us that that is something about what's happening in the world.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: And the argument that I would make, I I I get your point about reality TV, right?
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: But it's a, and I and I know that was sort of meant somewhat tongue-in-cheek, right?
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's clearly some environ, if you like, environmental factor.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 28:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and what's the biggest thing that has changed since the 1990s?
• 28:59
  SPEAKER_01: It's been omnipresent technology.
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_01: So it probably plays some role.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I would say we should figure out if we care, and if we do care, we should talk about it, and then we should figure out what we're gonna do about it.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: Your point about the role of, you know, the specific role that AI plays in it, agree, TBD, but what we do know, at least, you know, I know from the from the work that I've done, is that how you interact with AI does have an impact on the value that you get out of AI, yeah, and it does have an impact on your ability to continue to develop as a as a human.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I think people need to think very carefully about that before they pick up before they use do AI as the crutch, AI as the, oh, I'll just have it all do all the things I'm not terribly good at type version.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: And before they repeatedly and continuously do that and mindlessly pick it up to do various things, if they can just think about it a little bit differently and use it a little bit differently, then the chances of them having a relationship with AI that allows them to continue to develop as a human is much greater versus the the other possibility was it just becomes their replacement.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: It does your it does your brain work out for you.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 30:27
  SPEAKER_02: That was really great.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it's a wild time to try to balance all this, and I think your your point is is good that is there enough conversation at enough levels to penetrate uh the general public, or does it just as it appears on our phone, it just you don't even realize you didn't even have to opt in anymore to search generally being the way it answers your questions.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_02: Like uh Google just turned into it.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_02: You know, so I guess uh who was it recently had a thing where you could turn it off?
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um maybe Firefox or or there was some uh web browser I think that said you could actually turn off AI in all of the answers.
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um but uh yeah it's fascinating.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_02: And you also mentioned in there uh the how you use it, but also the when.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_02: And just uh if you could just uh talk a little bit more about the the when piece, because I think that's an interesting way to an interesting lens to put on it.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um I yeah, you and I have spoken about this a a lot, and when I'm uh when I'm training people and consulting with people on this, I I definitely talk about this a great deal.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um when particularly when it comes to thinking and thinking and communicating, um I'd urge people to be very careful about thinking about when AI comes into the picture.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: So you can run this experiment yourself.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: If you um are creating something that is net new um and you start by uh asking AI for ideas, and then you go through the whole of the creation process all the way to the point of sending something, you will likely end up with something that is very framed by that initial response that AI came up with.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you think about it, what you're effectively doing when you say to AI is like, I don't really have an opinion on this.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: You just you you frame the landscape for me.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_01: And then having AI framed the landscape for you, it's extremely likely that your thinking is going to be constrained by that landscape that AI has just framed.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas if you do this, whereas even if it's fairly rudimentary, if you spend five minutes, ten minutes um like thinking carefully about how you would approach this yourself, how you would answer these questions yourself.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then understanding, okay, well, I need a little bit of I need a little bit of AI to help me here, or I need AI to help me go deeper here.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: When you get to the point where you develop the end product, you'll define, you'll find something that is much richer and a blend between what you've done and what AI has done.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 33:45
  SPEAKER_01: So I bring this to my writing as well now, Matt.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm working on a follow-up to the AI Ready Human at the moment.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_01: And um and when I'm thinking through concepts that are gonna be in the book, before I before I write anything, and definitely before I explore any concepts alongside AI, I'm literally writing down on a pen and paper before every writing session what direction it's gonna go, what are the key ideas that I want to uh that I want to flesh out, and so on.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_01: And the richness that I'm getting from doing that initial work myself isn't just helping me retain agency and think what I think about it, yeah.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but it's it's also helping create product that is better.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a it's a win-win because you create something that is richer and better, but you also retain it because you thought about it and you created it.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's like I'm in control of this, I'm gonna think about what these things are, I'm gonna use AI to help you go a little deeper here, a little deeper there.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_01: I'm using AI to stretch me versus AI inhibiting me.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_02: Well, it is uh it is a fascinating time to to be plan be paying attention to all of this, and hopefully some of these conversations will resonate with uh more folks that can uh talk to more people about it.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_02: I think you're right, conversations is uh gonna be the key.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_02: So all right, Paul.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh we'll look forward to the next big question, and uh thanks for uh the explanation on this one.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks a lot.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: Really appreciate it.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: Humanity Working is produced by Matt Neal.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: If you liked this episode, please take a moment to rate and review us on your favorite podcast platform.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: It makes a huge difference in helping others find us.
• 35:45
  SPEAKER_00: And don't forget, you can find all episodes and get our weekly newsletter at humanityworking.net.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_00: See you next time.