Your Brain Is Turning to Porridge
It’s like having someone else chew your food for you.
Let’s talk about what AI is actually doing to your head. Not in some distant, sci-fi, Terminator-kills-us-all sense, but right now, today, whilst you’re sat there with your laptop open and ChatGPT purring away in another tab like a helpful digital butler.
It’s making you thick.
Not thick in the traditional sense. You’re not suddenly going to forget how to tie your shoelaces or start believing the moon is made of Wensleydale. No, it’s more insidious than that. It’s making you cognitively lazy. Which is worse, frankly, because at least being stupid is honest. This is like being intelligent but increasingly unwilling to prove it.
Here’s what happens: AI checks something for you. A fact, a calculation, a bit of grammar. Fine. Useful. But you don’t check it afterwards, do you? Why would you? The machine checked it. The machine is never wrong. Except it is, frequently, but you’ve already moved on because thinking about whether the machine might be talking bollocks requires effort and effort is precisely what you’re trying to avoid.
Then AI generates something for you. An email, a report, a bloody poem if you’re feeling particularly lazy. And you read it and think, “Yeah, that’ll do,” and send it off into the world without really engaging with whether it’s any good or even whether it’s true. You’ve outsourced the thinking bit. You’re just quality control now, except you’re rubbish at quality control because you’ve stopped practising the very skills you’re supposed to be checking for.
It’s like having someone else chew your food for you. Technically you’re still eating, but your jaw muscles are going to waste away until you’re left gumming at a piece of toast like a pensioner who’s lost his dentures.
And the really brilliant part is that you don’t even notice it happening. It’s not like waking up one morning and discovering you’ve turned into a drooling moron. It’s gradual. Imperceptible. Like your brain is a knife and you’ve just stopped sharpening it because, well, you’ve got this electric carving machine that does the job faster. And sure, the electric machine is fine, very efficient, but your knife is now about as sharp as a butter spreader and about as useful in a crisis.
You’re not becoming stupid. That would almost be better. At least stupid people know they’re stupid and can adjust accordingly. No, you’re becoming blunt. Dulled. Like a pencil that’s been used too much and never sharpened. The core intelligence is still there, somewhere underneath, but the edges have worn down and now you just sort of... smudge at problems instead of cutting through them.
Thinking is a use-it-or-lose-it kind of thing. Your brain isn’t a hard drive that maintains perfect fidelity forever. It’s a muscle. A weird, squidgy, three-pound muscle that lives in your skull and demands constant exercise or it starts to atrophy. And you’ve been using it less. Not because you’re lazy in the moral sense, not because you’re a bad person, but because there’s a very clever piece of software right there that will happily do the thinking for you, and why wouldn’t you let it?
I’ll tell you why. Because every time you let the machine do the work, you get worse at doing the work yourself. Every time you ask AI to solve a problem instead of wrestling with it yourself, you rob yourself of the practice that keeps your brain functional. It’s like getting a taxi everywhere and then wondering why you’re knackered after climbing a flight of stairs.
So here’s the deeply irritating prescription: use your brain more. On purpose. Even when it’s harder. Especially when it’s harder.
Check the thing AI checked. Question the thing AI generated. Think through the problem yourself before asking the helpful digital oracle for its opinion. Will it take longer? Yes. Will it be more annoying? Absolutely. Will you occasionally get things wrong that AI would’ve got right? Probably.
But at least your brain will still work.
Because the alternative is sleepwalking into a future where you’ve got access to unlimited intelligence but your own personal supply has dwindled to the point where you can’t tell whether the unlimited intelligence is talking complete nonsense. And at that point, you might as well be a very expensive USB stick with anxiety.
Think. While you still can. While it’s still even slightly difficult.
Or don’t, and see what happens when everyone’s cognitive abilities have eroded to the point where we’re all just pressing buttons and hoping the machine knows best.
I’m sure that’ll end brilliantly.