A.I. Mental Fallout Already? What Is Cognitive Debt?
Geekwire recently ran an opinion piece about how rapid reliance on AI is causing people to bypass the process of embracing and truly understanding what the tool does, and now an MIT Study shows there's a new potential brain 'erosion.'
What Is Cognitive Debt?
Alonda Williams wrote a very compelling and fascinating piece about how many leaders and workers who heavily rely on AI find that although they saved a lot of time, found they couldn't say how they benefitted other than---saving time.
What? What she means is, people are using AI as a tool to "get back time" but not using AI to ask better questions. She says there's a leadership and skills gap, little investment in the human skill to determine if the new capability works.
AI has 'Removed' Three Huge Questions From Decisions
She says AI has removed 3 questions that she calls high cost in the world of business and operations. The first is the social cost, asking AI something that you couldn't ask a co-worker without hurting the relationship.
The second is the time cost...no constraints of appointments or availabilities or managing relationships. And the third is the judgment cost, which she says is the inner voice that filters out the question before it's asked. She calls that a structural "change in the cost of intellectual honesty."
What Is Cognitive Debt?
An MIT Media Lab study recently showed subjects in a four-month study who used Chat GPT to write essays showed significantly weaker neural (brain) engagement than those who wrote for themselves. The study also showed when AI users were asked to write without their tool, their brains remained less activated.
The MIT report and Williams said it was as if those people had adapted to outsourcing the effort, referring to them using AI most of the time. She also goes on to say that only humans can determine "why we work and what we are trying to achieve."
This article is worth a read, and re-read. The title says a lot: "Everyone Is Asking AI Better Questions-Nobody is Asking Themselves Better Ones."
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