How to stop AI from killing your critical thinking

A TED talk by Advait Sarkar, where he illustrates how professional knowledge workers tend to use AI and how this will eventually impact our brains. He also presents a prototype where AI is kept in the loop, but the user remains involved in the intellectual process, possibly augmented by AI assistance.

I noted down some quotes from the talk that hit home.

Welcome to the age of outsourced reason. Where the knowledge worker no longer engages with the materials of their craft. We’ve become intellectual tourists. In our own work, we visit ideas. We don’t inhabit them.

We’ve solved the problem of having to think. Unfortunately, thinking wasn’t actually a problem. It’s like we invented a cure for exercise and then wondered why we’re out of breath all the time.

You can demonstrably reintroduce critical thinking into AI-assisted workflows. You can reverse the loss of creativity and enhance it instead. You can build powerful tools for memory that enable knowledge workers to read and write at speed with greater intentionality and remember it, too.