The Downfall of Human Competence

Seventeenth-century philosopher, René Descartes, famously wrote the words “Cogito ergo sum,” "I think, therefore I am” in his 1637 Discourse on the Method. By this, he meant that thinking is the only thing that is guaranteed to be true in this world and that maybe a person’s worldview shapes the identity of the person themselves.

Unfortunately, AI demotes thinking to something optional, something that isn’t necessary when AI is doing the thinking for them. In this way, AI may stunt the development of the people using it, countering the development of self.

Researcher Helms Potter claims that “individuals who have been exposed to high cognitive demand tasks throughout their lives tend to exhibit higher intellectual abilities." This means that people who have been assigned hard tasks that require a large amount of thinking are more likely to be intelligent individuals and can solve problems more efficiently.

Yet, AI creates a situation in which intellectual tasks do not need to be solved by people. As researcher Umberto León-Domínguez argues, the use of AI deteriorates how humans process information, as AI can easily contextualize it in a more digestible way, making people use fewer of their intellectual resources.

He describes a concept, “cognitive offloading,” through which the action of relying on an external resource (in this case, AI) to complete a cognitive task, such as memorizing dates or creating lists, makes individuals less reliant on their own brain to organize these tasks.

As he states, “a risk remains that for a certain segment of the population, the pervasive use of AI chatbots may diminish specific cognitive skills—particularly if individuals do not utilize the freed cognitive resources for other tasks that pose cognitive challenges.”

In short, individuals who don’t overuse AI to offload tasks will likely be intellectually inclined. As technology advances and becomes more competent, human abilities will decline in response. In the modern world, this process is already happening.

Humans often use AI for assignments and tasks. And as humans realize tasks can be done effortlessly and quickly with AI, they will eventually start relying on it entirely. Anything that is considered difficult is dumped onto it, leaving users with all the easy tasks. As humans grow more incompetent and find out the AI can take care of such tasks, they will put those minor tasks on the AI as well. The cycle repeats and spirals until humans are unable to do anything at all.

Most people view AI as a revolutionary program. It learns by itself, can mimic human behavior, and even create art and literature on its own. Many companies use AI to edit their work, generate ideas and business pitches. It molds itself to fit the preferences of customers, and even increases productivity in the workplace.

This, it is thought, will result in the human employees needing to do less work. Yet, it is more likely that company revenue will increase while employee pay decreases.

As AI gets exponentially better and better, it will become more competent and efficient than most humans, resulting in higher unemployment rates. The rich (who own companies and the new technology running them) will become richer, and the poor (out of work) will become poorer. It becomes a cycle in which fewer people are able to hold their jobs, and could result in exponential recession and unemployment.

While AI has its merits, it still has the potential to hurt the way we function as of now. Perhaps in the future, when we as humans (our brains specifically), evolve to coexist with modern technology without hindrances on both ends, we can incorporate AI more effectively into our lives without the cost of our own humanity.

Since 1995, it seems, Albert Einstein has been associated with the quote "It’s become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity." Yet, there is no evidence that he actually said this. In fact, it comes from a 1995 movie called Powder.

Despite being associated with Einstein, they are actually words spoken by Donald Ripley, played by Jeff Goldblum. The film builds itself on the premise of embracing what is not perfect and how human bias and bigotry (mental laziness) can get in the way of that.

Einstein’s actual quote goes like this:

It comes from a New York Times article published in 1945 where Einstein described humans as ignorant and sadistic individuals with the power to enact that cruelty onto others. He asks: why would we trust anything with that capability to humans?

Similarly, AI represents a scary combination of voluntary ignorance and danger. For those who ignore information, technology takes on that burden for them. However, this can result in the distortion of information in the world, reducing authenticity to something a computer came up with.

The misattribution of the Einstein-Goldblum quote is an allegory for how humans are easily misled, and how false information can be spread disturbingly quickly. This, some people warn us, is what AI will do.

Without recognizing the importance of using our own intelligence to create our own conclusions, that ability will eventually diminish until AI replaces it entirely.