The Mechanized Mind: AI’s Hidden Impact on Human Thought

The better AI gets at doing our work for us, the more we outsource our thinking to it. Thus, as we make machines more humanlike, they make us more machinelike. Perhaps we should be less worried about AI becoming conscious, than about humanity becoming unconscious.

It turns out that computers are particularly adept at the tasks that we humans find most difficult: crunching equations, solving logical propositions, and other modes of abstract thought. What artificial intelligence finds most difficult are the sensory perceptive tasks and motor skills that we perform unconsciously: walking, drinking from a cup, s

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The first step is to understand the fundamental difference between humans and AIs. We are analog, chemical beings, with emotions and feelings. Compared with machines, we think slowly—and we act too fast, failing to consider the long-term consequences of our behavior (which AI can help predict). So we should not compete with AI; we should use it. At... See more