.cognitive laziness

Once again, my plan to publish weekly went to hell. And once again, I'm back to square one, removing my creative block by writing whatever whenever is on my mind.

I have so many great angles that I want to explore, loose thoughts, inspiring or provoking quotes that I think you'd like. About free will vs. intent (btw. Guido Palazzo's shares are constant flow of inspiration), .vulnerability vs. oversharing; drawing boundaries;.ichigo ichie 一期一会; .knowing vs. understanding, short-sightedness and ego in business , the Pleasure of Anticipation vs. acquisition, the bullshit of corporate motivation (spoiler alert: risk avoidance), and so many more.

As of now, I have 127 drafts waiting to be polished and published, some of them waiting on the server for more than 8 years...

Part of the reason why I can't make myself publish those on a weekly basis (if I did, I would be done with my current ones in little more than 2 years ??) is that almost each of those topics demand a big chunk of time for research. I want each new posts to be better and well-thought and clearer in punchline than the last (even though most of my worst ones get the most views - oh irony).

And another, most recent reason is... using AI assistants.

I feel how using AI writing assistants is making my brain lazy, not taking time to understand a concept and come up with a nice mix of polymathic threads drawing from my own experience and stories of others. I try not to contribute to increasing meaningless data creation on a subject while lowering its average quality and writing essays when that thing could have been a few words instead (a.ka spamming). But when the news is hot and the algorithms show rapidly declining profile views, the temptation is just too high.

But it's just another instant gratification. It may feel good on the outside, but it's doing serious damage in the long term.

What goes around, comes around

While I find summarising meetings, formatting emails, finding puns for instagram captions, or listing other potential cases a great use of AI assistants, one thing that I stay away from is - using them to write personalised responses to people whom I value and invested my time in. I always try to make my emails as personalised as possible, especially when it comes to prospecting. You want to show that you understand their problem, that you put time and effort.

Sure, there are many AI tools that claim to be just that, but until they can't read my mind (FY Neuralink and the likes), it will always feel off.

People ain't that stupid.

That's why it hit me a little to see that one of those prospects, whom I held a couple of (I thought) well-rounded chats and established quite a close raport... to see him do just that: ChatGPTed me. How did I notice it? I used a string of words considered by the chat as a "product" name, which he didn't even bother changing in his 'write-me-a-polite-rejection-response' prompt creation.

I am a kid of late 80s so I was growing up with the rise of the internet. I experienced learning in a very much analogue form, and I grew up to turn to digital for deepening and updating my knowledge.

If I think about my era of learning; curiosity, experimentation, good questions were always paramount, you had no choice.

I remember a primary school with an array of gilded encyclopaedias (a lot of them, since my mom was a literature teacher). I remember high school buying 'PC World' magazine on several CD-ROMs and exchanging 'emails' on floppy disks, because the other person still didn't have their crackling connection to the world. I then remember discovering Wikipedia and learning how to build my own HTML static website to share what I learned (about the Sims, but still).

We were taught how to find things out, how to question things.

I sometimes feel like we jumped on a whole different level in just a couple of years, but the fact is that jumps will keep repeating on a much more exponential scale.

But I'm often wondering how will the future kids navigate through the world - will they have their knowledge uploaded and curiosity reduced? Becoming a creation of perfectly engineered intent creation in place of a free will?

I read somewhere that, in some ways AI is like stabilisers on a bike. It allows people to do things they couldn't do before. But to what extent will people rely on them too much?

To what extent will people growing up never develop the muscles they need? I worry about cognitive laziness and how it makes me and the others towards me - impersonal.

People assessing whether AI is allowing people to do x% more, or work x% harder, or outsource x% more work, are utterly missing the point.

You can't possibly measure impacts now, you can only measure it in several years in. Collect evidence and compare apples with apples. Have people become better at working? Have new systems and processes developed to allow far greater efficiencies and focus on what's important to us?

Or ... have people atrophied?

Have people stopped thinking and questioning things and fighting for freedom - whatever it means to them. Have people become so reliant on support, that they are prone to mistakes, prone to not remembering things, prone to feeling their way through the data, prone to ignoring instinct from immersion and content.

It's one thing to not remember phone numbers or birthdays or do mental arithmetic. We don't need to remember such things. I'm fine with delegating it to computers and removing it from my flesh-based memory.

But it's another not having a feeling for what seems not quite right, not having navigational skills through data - much of it pseudo fabricated - this to me seems like a bigger issue.

Yes, we should be super excited for all this technological progress and I wouldn't be building my part via Untrite if I felt otherwise. But in all this excitement - let's not forget to grow our minds alongside it, and continue to learn how to

think.