Article by Ezra Klein: “…Researchers have drawn a distinction between “cognitive offloading” and “cognitive surrender.” Cognitive offloading comes when you shift a discrete task over to a tool like a calculator; cognitive surrender comes when, as Steven Shaw and Gideon Mave of the University of Pennsylvania put it, “the user relinquishes cognitive control and adopts the A.I.’s judgment as their own.” In practice, I wonder whether this distinction is so clean: My use of calculators has surely atrophied my math skills, as my use of mapping services has allowed my (already poor) sense of direction to diminish further.
But cognitive surrender is clearly real, and with it will come the atrophy of certain skills and capacities, or the absence of their development in the first place. The work I am doing now, struggling through yet another draft of this essay, is the work that deepens my thinking for later.
In a thoughtful piece, the technology writer Azeem Azhar describes his efforts to safeguard “the space where ideas arrive before they’re shaped.” But how many of us will put in such careful, reflective effort to protect our most generative spaces of thought? How many people even know which spaces should be protected? For me, the arrival of an idea is less generative than the work that goes into chiseling that idea into something publishable. This whole essay began as a vague thought about A.I. and McLuhan. If I have gained anything in this process, it has been in the toil that followed inspiration.
The other thing I notice the A.I. doing is constantly referring back to other things it knows, or thinks it knows, about me. Sycophancy, in my experience, has given way to an occasionally unsettling attentiveness; a constant drawing of connections between my current concerns and my past queries, like a therapist desperate to prove he’s been paying close attention.
The result is a strange amalgam of feeling seen and feeling caricatured. Ideas I might otherwise have dropped keep getting reanimated; personal struggles I might otherwise move on from keep returning unexpectedly to my screen. I am occasionally startled by the recognition of a pattern I hadn’t noticed; I am often irked by the recitation of a thought I’m no longer interested in. The effect is to constantly reinforce a certain version of myself. My self is quite settled, but what if it wasn’t?
The A.I. knows me imperfectly, and so it overtorques on what it knows and ignores what it doesn’t. But there is much it can never know about me, and there is much I won’t share, or don’t even know about myself. I wonder whether deeper reliance on A.I. would desiccate those less legible aspects of myself, and it’s one reason I hold myself back. But I am in my 40s, and I still feel the shock of something new and strange when I reveal myself to these systems. I think the young will allow themselves to be known to their A.I.s in ways that will make their elders shudder…(More)”.
