The Case Against Overreliance
As with many things, AI’s net impact on our wellbeing is uncertain, with that impact largely depending on how we use and incorporate it into our lives and our work. GenAI can either reduce our shortcomings or erode our abilities, depending on how we use it.
As long as technology reduces our shortcomings, it allows us to soar to ever-greater heights; to achieve the next great accomplishments and surpass even those. The fruits of humanity’s labor over millennia have built us a world where we just do this. We’ve built enormous pyramids, landed on the moon, erected sky-scraping towers, and touched every corner of the world. These come as a result of our many advances and innovations, all building on top of the ones before. These inventions have enabled us to reach further and do more. They reduced our shortcomings. It is when technology begins to erode our abilities that we must take care.
AI and its incredible applications can often help us solve our most time-consuming problems and free our attention to focus on what really matters. Yet what “really matters” is often unclear. Turning to it for a quick grammar check can turn into directing it to answer our homework questions, which can turn into having it write entire essays. It’s often through the process of producing these things that we learn the most. If we cut out the process, we will lose our ability to think, research, and structure our thoughts. We must avoid this.
Other tasks, like writing emails, do not necessarily help us build any fundamental abilities. In essay-writing, we learn to make and defend an argument. That is a fundamental ability that we erode by outsourcing the task to genAI. An email, on the other hand, may teach us to communicate. However, there is no setting in which we will need to write an email without ChatGPT’s help. And communication can be learned elsewhere. Emails are not an intrinsically valuable method of communicating. Meanwhile, they present a significant opportunity cost that distracts us from writing essays. By outsourcing our more trivial tasks, we can devote more time to practicing fundamental abilities.
It is imperative that we are deliberate in when and how we employ genAI. Writing an email is not like writing an essay, where the process is as important as the outcome. We must outsource those tasks where the process is trivial, and deliberately retain those tasks where it is important. In doing so, we will preserve our most important abilities, and have more time to hone them.
GenAI must be used conscientiously. It should be used to aid our thinking, challenge our assumptions, and help us through these processes. But it shouldn’t be formulating ideas instead of us. To allow it to would make us mere conduits. What we produce wouldn’t be a testament to the heights humanity can soar to, but a bleak homage to the technology that got there first.
As long as technology reduces our shortcomings, it allows us to soar to ever-greater heights; to achieve the next great accomplishments and surpass even those. The fruits of humanity’s labor over millennia have built us a world where we just do this. We’ve built enormous pyramids, landed on the moon, erected sky-scraping towers, and touched every corner of the world. These come as a result of our many advances and innovations, all building on top of the ones before. These inventions have enabled us to reach further and do more. They reduced our shortcomings. It is when technology begins to erode our abilities that we must take care.
AI and its incredible applications can often help us solve our most time-consuming problems and free our attention to focus on what really matters. Yet what “really matters” is often unclear. Turning to it for a quick grammar check can turn into directing it to answer our homework questions, which can turn into having it write entire essays. It’s often through the process of producing these things that we learn the most. If we cut out the process, we will lose our ability to think, research, and structure our thoughts. We must avoid this.
Other tasks, like writing emails, do not necessarily help us build any fundamental abilities. In essay-writing, we learn to make and defend an argument. That is a fundamental ability that we erode by outsourcing the task to genAI. An email, on the other hand, may teach us to communicate. However, there is no setting in which we will need to write an email without ChatGPT’s help. And communication can be learned elsewhere. Emails are not an intrinsically valuable method of communicating. Meanwhile, they present a significant opportunity cost that distracts us from writing essays. By outsourcing our more trivial tasks, we can devote more time to practicing fundamental abilities.
It is imperative that we are deliberate in when and how we employ genAI. Writing an email is not like writing an essay, where the process is as important as the outcome. We must outsource those tasks where the process is trivial, and deliberately retain those tasks where it is important. In doing so, we will preserve our most important abilities, and have more time to hone them.
GenAI must be used conscientiously. It should be used to aid our thinking, challenge our assumptions, and help us through these processes. But it shouldn’t be formulating ideas instead of us. To allow it to would make us mere conduits. What we produce wouldn’t be a testament to the heights humanity can soar to, but a bleak homage to the technology that got there first.
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