At home, my office is near the kitchen, and the other day, I decided it was time for a sneaky snack. But as I took the few steps from my office towards the cake tin, I realised my knees were hurting. Normally, my knees don’t hurt, so I wondered what had gone wrong. My wife quickly diagnosed the issue. She said, “That’s the first time you have moved from your office all morning. No wonder your knees hurt.”
It is a reminder of that phrase, “use it or lose it”. A completely sedentary lifestyle is not good for our muscles or our heart. Sports scientists have pointed out that when people stop playing professional sport, several physical issues tend to crop up because of the lifestyle change. Staying physically active helps prevent illness in such individuals.
The same appears to be true for our mind. Over a decade ago, researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota found that we protect our brains from age-related decline if we keep using them. British researchers confirmed a few years ago that keeping our brains sharp reduces the likelihood of later-life memory loss or thinking decline. In other words, keep using your brain, and it protects you psychologically. The “use it or lose it” concept applies as much to mental well-being as it does to physical health.
Worryingly, the World Health Organization predicted that the increased sedentary lifestyle we are living is likely to lead to 500m cases of preventable disease by 2030. The WHO also says that increasing physical activity could avoid up to 5m deaths each year.
It is worth thinking about what would happen if we also stopped using our brains at the same rate we have been stopping physical activity. Our bodies are functioning less effectively because we lack movement. The chances are that we’ll also end up with psychological and neurological disorders if we stop being active with our minds.
And guess what? We are already losing our minds. Every day I witness people who have given up thinking. They are using artificial intelligence to do their thinking for them. They don’t question what AI has given them. They just use it because it is convenient and saves time.
When I was at school, we had to remember things “by rote”, reciting things over and over again until they were embedded in our brains. But what is the point of a child trying to remember the names of the six wives of Henry VIII when a quick Google search will tell them? Come on, admit it. You have outsourced your memory to Google. You don’t even bother to remember things because you know Google is your extended memory. Indeed, a Columbia University psychologist found that Google has actually changed the way our memory works.
So what if we all start doing the same thing with artificial intelligence? What if we outsource our thinking to AI? Some people are already doing this. And even if you are not doing it yet, you will soon. After all, when Google came out, you still tried to remember things until you realised that Google could do it for you. We are likely to go the same way with AI. In fact, it looks like we have already started to transfer thinking to AI systems. Researchers at Microsoft found that when we trust artificial intelligence, we think less critically.
I was pondering this issue yesterday when this Guardian article landed on my desk. In it, an Edinburgh academic has raised the same problem. Professor Devi Sridhar wonders what will happen if we all give up thinking.
Of course, this concern is nothing new. Plato has Socrates warning that writing would destroy people’s memories. When calculators arrived in classrooms, teachers thought children would never learn arithmetic. Each time, the doom-mongers were largely wrong, because handing off a routine task freed our brains for something more demanding. So why should AI be any different? Because this time, what we are handing over is not the storage of facts or the donkey work of sums. It is the judgement itself. Google gave you the names of Henry VIII’s wives, but it still left you to decide what that meant. AI will happily do the deciding too, if you let it.
None of us can change what society at large will do about this. If we wait for something to happen, we may well have damaged our brains. So we have to look after ourselves now, because nobody else will.
That means we have to start arguing with artificial intelligence. When you get it to do something, cast a critical eye over it and don’t just accept what it says. This will not only help you maximise your returns from AI, but also keep your brain engaged.
I work with a variety of AI tools every day. They might be getting fed up with me because I keep challenging them. I have a think about what they say, sometimes tell them they are wrong, or argue a point with them. I don’t usually treat what AI produces as the “complete answer” but as a starting point for a debate. It is what we do with human colleagues, so why would we not do it with AI? It certainly means I have to keep thinking.
So here is your challenge for this week. Next time AI hands you an answer, do three things before you use it. Ask yourself what it might have got wrong. Check one claim independently. And rewrite the key point it has made, in your own words. If you run a team, make these rules for them too. It takes a couple of minutes, about as long as my walk to the cake tin. And just as my knees told me that I hadn’t moved all morning, the first time you argue with AI, you might notice how long it’s been since your brain had a proper workout. Tell me in the comments how you get on. See how generous I am being with your brain by asking you to think for a moment?
