You don’t need artificial intelligence to summarize an email thread or schedule a meeting, but it can make mundane tasks easier and faster.

That’s fine, but there’s a benefit to using AI to help us think critically and to do things we couldn’t do alone. To challenge ourselves. To push against the outer limits of what is possible and facilitate breakthroughs not possible without it.

AI is more than an answer machine. Used well, it can help you go beyond what’s possible today.

If you’re willing to.

Troubling Signs

I’m reading Mark Schaefer’s new book, “How AI Changes Your Customers.” It’s a fascinating read and, while it deserves its own post soon to help me process his insights and recommendations, one key idea is pertinent here.

Written after he participated in a study which collected the views of 300 futurists on how humanity may change in the AI age, Mark shares his insights about some potential impacts of humans using AI. A key idea:

“The ability of AI systems to perform increasingly powerful reasoning tasks will make it easy for most humans to avoid having to think hard and thus allow that muscle to atrophy.”

What does this look like?

In a work setting, it looks like asking AI to write a performance review for a direct report who’s done exemplary work all year. In your personal life, it can show up as letting AI respond to your text messages or maybe even writing a wedding toast.

Put simply, you just let AI do it while you get more complacent and more unable to think for yourself.

With AI, you don’t necessarily need to think hard any more.

But you should.

The Slippery Slope

Recently I got to participate in a conversation Mark had with Gregory Pouy, the top podcaster in France. At the beginning of the deep conversation about AI and its impacts on people and society, Mark shared a quote from one of Greg’s blog posts:

“When I asked ChatGPT to write my emails, I save 30 seconds, but I give up 30 seconds of mental exercise. When I ask it to summarize a book, I avoid three hours of reading, but I’ve deprived myself of three hours of personal reflections. These micro abandonments accumulate, and one day we wake up with a soft brain.”

I know Mark and Greg covered a lot of ground after that, but I couldn’t shake the soft brain image. I imagined each micro abandonment, each decision to just let AI do it, as one more brain cell withering.

And, I wondered, what could I do to help people avoid taking unnecessary shortcuts, to resist checking their higher reasoning at the door in order to keep their brains taut and toned?

Maybe an example from last week could be helpful.

A Better, More Fulfilling Way

I occasionally use AI for simple, rote work. It can be a force multiplier, handling easy things to enable me to do other, more taxing tasks.

But I also use AI to teach me how to do things I don’t know how to do myself. One example?

I wanted a transcript of Mark and Greg’s conversation. I don’t pay for a service which does this, so I asked ChatGPT how I could accomplish the goal.

It gave me multiple options, one of which was to use Python to install two programs required to complete the transcription at no cost on my home computer. I don’t know Python from Pitfall Harry, but I do know how to use the command line interface, so I dove into the process.

An hour later, I had a complete transcript of the conversation. I’d spent zero dollars while in the process getting more comfortable with working with limited Python commands.

AI didn’t give me a simple answer. The path was complex. I had to assess what I saw on the screen, make judgements, craft follow up prompts, and stick with it until the end.

By the end of the process, if I wasn’t smarter, I felt genuine pride in working through the uncharted waters. I may have even done a little dance.

And I got there by not letting AI just do it. We pushed one another forward.

You Can Do It Too

Challenging yourself, and pushing AI to the limits of what it and you may be capable of, is the right approach.

When AI offers to do it for you, don’t let it. Refuse to squander your opportunity to improve your critical thinking. Instead, use AI to learn and level up.

To do anything less, surrenders what sets us apart from every other species and technology.

If you need a hand getting started with that, I’m available to help. Let’s figure it out together.