Will Artificial Intelligence Make Us Lazy Thinkers?
At a recent commencement speech at Wake Forest University, Larry Culp, the CEO of General Electric, made an interesting argument about popular technologies and tools people depend upon to express their thinking. He contends that it’s easy for people to become so overly reliant on some tools that they become lazy in their thinking.
It’s not the tools but the use of them that makes people more superficial and less substantive when they reach important conclusions.
Culp points to the overuse of PowerPoint and Social Media as two such corruptive influences. Both tools encourage people to rely heavily on superficial explanations of complex ideas. They ask users to condense substantive thoughts and opinions into bite-sized messages and bullet points. The desire for simplification promoted by both tools sacrifices important details and nuances and replaces thoughtful analysis with platitudes and catchy phrases. The end result is a more one-sided conversation without much depth.
PowerPoint and Social Media are not inherently responsible for this lazy thinking, but they contribute to it when people become overly reliant on them to express their thinking. Any tool or technology that replaces substantive thinking by way of format or structure is a danger when it comes into widespread use. Good leaders don’t prohibit or avoid such valuable tools, but they do guard against their overuse.
It's too early to tell if Artificial Intelligence Chatbots will make people smarter or dumber. But AI clearly has the potential to replace deep thinking with an instant answer to any question.
The option to allow artificial intelligence to think for us will be hugely attractive to many people. If and when that becomes a trend, then AI will be yet another tool that makes us lazy thinkers.
AI will likely prove unequaled as a tool for learning and solving problems. But striking a balance between using AI as a helpful resource while still cultivating a critical mindset will be a crucial test for thoughtful leaders over the next few years.
Thinking critically is the hardest work there is. Letting anything think too much for you is never a great idea.
That is an excellent point, but it started mainly with the advent of the Internet in the 1990s. It is so easy to search and read an article or two to get a 10,000 feet view of any topic. In the past, it required reading a book or two. I am not saying all articles are bad but most really do not have a depth of reading a book or two on the same topic.
With AI, we will be reading a more concise view of the topic and also a one-sided view rather than with Google; there is a possibility that we may get two or more sites giving a different view. The media has also started influencing the same way by providing a one-sided worldview. We really need both sides of the view to decide what we think is our view on a topic. However, easily accessible tools, we will outsource most of our thinking to AI as we have lost most of our navigation capabilities with the advent of GPS and calculators that took away our ability to do simple arithmetic. ChatGPT like products will take our ability to write and think over time if we keep the current course.
One way to avoid it is to think on your own before you use Google or ChatGPT or any other tool, but the convenience and easy availability of these tools will be tough to overcome.