Earlier this week, I came across this article, “AI That Acts Before You Ask is the Next Leap in Intelligence.” The subtitle reads, “The future belongs to proactive systems.”
The authors are right in one sense. This is exactly what AI proponents are pushing and it is what AI companies will, in fact, be able to deliver; but my advice: Buyer beware!
If you become overly reliant on AI, what you may be doing–either intentionally or unintentionally– is outsourcing your thinking.
I need you to think about this for a good, long, hard minute. Do you really want to outsource your thinking to AI … or anyone else for that matter?
I recently began teaching a course on strategic foresight at the College of St. Benedict’s and St. John’s University and what I told my students in the first class is that AI will deliver extraordinary benefits in the near future. But, if they become too dependent on AI to do their thinking for them, their thinking skills will atrophy at the very moment in human history when this skill is set to become paramount.
Here are just two ways I told my students to think about AI, and I encourage you to do the same.
First, AI is really good at mimicking the human mind. However, what most people fail to appreciate is that humans don’t just “think” with their minds. We also think, feel, and sense with our body, heart and soul. AI can do none of these things and it is these human “senses” which will become more vital in the world of tomorrow.
Second, there is a danger that someday soon AI will neither work nor function properly. A nefarious hacker, cyber warfare, or even a “one-in-a-hundred year” solar storm could render the infrastructure upon which AI depends obsolete. If any of these things were to happen and the AI systems were to go down, society could be stranded with millions of people who are unable to function at a high level because they don’t know how to properly think for themselves.
David Foster Wallace once wrote, “learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over what and how you think.”
It is your future and you possess the ability to create it; but, to do so, it sure as hell helps to know how to think critically. Do you really want to outsource this vital skill to a machine?
