Don’t hand over your thinking brain to your AI assistant

Many in India would recall the November 2024 incident in Uttar Pradesh, where three men drove off a bridge into the Ramganga River after following Google Maps directions.

The incomplete bridge in Bareilly’s Badaun district had a section that collapsed due to floods in 2023. However, this change wasn’t updated in Maps, and the route looked operational. Local police reported that the driver, relying on the app, didn’t realize the bridge was unsafe and drove off the damaged section. Compounding the issue, there were no safety barriers or warning signs to alert drivers.

This chilling incident represents an extreme consequence of what happens in daily life, in subtler ways, when we hand over thinking and attention to technology. It’s called cognitive offloading. As AI channels our information, makes our decisions, and personalizes our thinking, we must ask what mental bridges we might be driving off without realizing.

Food for thought

Luckily, AI is descending on us so rapidly that it hasn’t managed to take over our mental faculties entirely, leaving us with some time to consider strategies to protect our brains while still managing to use the exciting new capabilities that come with artificial intelligence.

The practice of letting AI think for you creeps up insidiously. Because using it for tasks that require thought—writing, brainstorming, or making decisions—usually happens alongside something else, you might stop noticing it altogether.

As you “collaborate” with your chat assistant, it will be difficult to separate what thinking comes from the AI and what is solely yours. We are also lured by the trap of efficiency, which is so rewarding that we stop noticing what AI does to aid the thinking. As you offload a thinking task to AI over and over again, that skill starts to fade for you. One day, the skill is gone, and you become dependent on the tool, making you vulnerable.

Human thinking isn’t just one big process, but involves many different functions and faculties. The foundational or executive functions are the ones we need to protect first. One of the most critical skills impacted is memory. When you have a world of knowledge in your pocket and know you can get to any piece of information with a few button presses (and now even conversationally), you won’t be bothering to remember as much yourself.

We’ve all stopped remembering phone numbers long ago and don’t even know our own, sometimes. People even refer to it as the Google Effect or Digital Amnesia. Experts recommend that we try to remember some things, pause for a second and try to work something out before searching for the answer. After all, if you don’t use it, you lose it. We’re becoming quicker at finding information but less so at retaining it in our heads.

We also begin to take the availability of always-there information and guidance for granted. That’s how the three men happily going to attend a wedding ended up in the river instead. Mix all this with the fact that we’re facing an information overload, and we have a situation where technology is impacting our attention and focus. This is said to be a very real impairment, sometimes referred to as Digital Dementia.

Cost of convenience

The next misstep would be finding it easier to outsource critical thinking and judgment to generative AI, which makes for a convenient shortcut. If we stop questioning, brainstorming, evaluating, scrutinizing, deciding, and eventually creating, we are shifting our role from creator to supervisor. All the solutions and innovations that are put out into the world would gradually be generated by AI instead of coming from the unique thinking that humans are capable of. That is a frightening thought.

There’s clearly a significant cognitive cost to using technology, especially when it is pervasive and an integral part of everything we do. But we can’t just reject AI, just as we can’t reject electricity. AI eliminates much of the tedium and repetition associated with many tasks, making us faster and more productive. It also takes on tasks that we can never do, such as going through the whole internet in a few seconds. Think of what happens when you head to Google or a tool like Shazam and hum a song or let it listen to a piece of music. It takes mere seconds for it to identify the piece. And it’s looked at almost all the songs in the world.

Humans, at both an individual and societal level, need a cognitive contract with AI so that we can utilize it to make our lives more convenient and eliminate the tedium of routine and repetitive tasks, while retaining what makes us essentially human—our minds.

It’s worth taking up each of the thinking faculties on its own and delving into the strategies each of us could deploy to protect our extremely precious thinking skills.

The New Normal: The world is at an inflexion point. Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to be as massive a revolution as the Internet has been. The option to just stay away from AI will not be available to most people, as all the tech we use takes the AI route. This column series introduces AI to the non-techie in an easy and relatable way, aiming to demystify and help a user to actually put the technology to good use in everyday life.

Mala Bhargava is most often described as a ‘veteran’ writer who has contributed to several publications in India since 1995. Her domain is personal tech, and she writes to simplify and demystify technology for a non-techie audience.