AI is spurring our slide into a swarm of slobbering simpletons

Let’s breathe through our noses, and consider what AI is doing to our brains.

I don’t know about all of you, but I feel dumber. Maybe it’s because I’m older, or that I’m dealing with kids and mortgages and tax deductions. Maybe it’s the prevailing national discourse? I’d argue that’s certainly not doing any of us any cognitive favors.

Or maybe it’s technology. I’m in front of a screen for a good part of the day, be it my computer, TV, or phone. I do think that those things have all made me smarter and more capable over the years, but there are times when I’ve sacrificed brain cells for the sake of vegging out for a bit—I once watched six seasons of some show called “Chrisley Knows Best” for no apparent reason, and I couldn’t tell you who Chrisley is, why he’s famous, or why he had a TV show. All I know is that he’s in jail.

Interestingly, we’re getting more insight into what technology is doing to our brains. And more specifically, AI tools, which may be the newest and shiniest toys out there. Have you tried messing around with an AI tool yet? You’ve probably heard about them—ChatGPT is perhaps the biggest, but there are several others, such as Copilot, Llama, Gemini, Perplexity, DeepSeek, and so on. 

I’ll be the first tell you that I have not used or played around with most of these. The only one I have any real experience with is Copilot, which is Microsoft’s AI assistant. The only reason I used it was because I was asked to write some rather in-depth stuff about Excel functions, and I thought that Copilot would be able to help me understand and simplify those functions—I was right!

But many of you have probably used ChatGPT or Gemini for one reason or another. They’re pretty neat. I do, however, just think that they’re sort of the next evolution of a Google search. We hear about “prompt engineering,” and I don’t see how that’s all that much different from learning to use a search engine effectively, or utilize Boolean logic to find more precise terms.

That’s another topic, though.

Though all of this stuff is new, having really just come onto the scene and into our lives within the past couple of years, the technology is rapidly evolving. I wrote a story last summer about AI agents, which are basically virtual human beings, that was outdated by the time I finished with it. I had to kill the idea before it could publish. Suffice it to say that AI is real, and it’s speeding along at a healthy clip.

It may be moving along too fast. So fast that we’re not really able to grasp what the larger effects are on society. We know that it’s already leading to job losses—Google “AI layoffs” or something similar and you’ll see a lot of stories. And it makes sense. These sorts of technology can do a lot of things, and do them quickly. If you needed someone to write code, you can now just ask the AI to write it for you, and it’ll do it in 15 seconds. Why wouldn’t you take advantage of that?

To give you an idea of how transformational this stuff might be, I asked an expert a while back to put it in “caveman terms” so that I could understand. They said that it was basically like going from the abacus to the calculator. At one time, you needed a room full of people doing calculations to solve a difficult problem. Then, with a calculator, you could do it yourself in 20 seconds.

But again: What does it all mean for us? And our brains? The early indications aren’t good.

god let’s hope the data is lying

We know that social media was kinda-sorta a mistake. It’s melted people’s minds. It’s locked us into silos and echo chambers. It’s taken our data and attention. It appears that AI may be doing something similar.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Microsoft released a study this month, which looked at how Generative AI (that means all of these AI tools, collectively) is affecting critical thinking skills and practices among knowledge workers (creatives, etc.). The study itself surveyed 319 people to see what the deal was, and…it’s a bit concerning. 
Here’s the key takeaway, from the paper’s conclusion: 

“...While GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving. Higher confidence in GenAI’s ability to perform a task is related to less critical thinking effort. When using GenAI tools, the effort invested in critical thinking shifts from information gathering to information verification; from problem-solving to AI response integration; and from task execution to task stewardship. Knowledge workers face new challenges in critical thinking as they incorporate GenAI into their knowledge workflows.”

So, AI is melting our brains. People who use it at work are effectively offloading their critical thinking to AI tools, and, if I may be so bold, making us dumber. Here is, perhaps, the most important sentence in the whole study:

“Used improperly, technologies can and do result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved.” Deterioration! Lordy! I don’t think we need any more deterioration, of any kind, during these trying times!

Let’s keep our pants on: This is only one study. It’s an early one. And it only focuses on one specific type of work. So, things could change. We don’t really have a grasp on how AI is going to change things yet, or how people are going to incorporate it into their lives and work. But I think this is worth paying attention to, and when you think about it, the whole point of these tools is to offload critical thinking…isn’t it? 

Why write that email when the machine can do it for you? Why try to think up a synonym when the machine can spit out numerous options in two seconds? Why why why??

I do think it’s only a matter of time before we forget how to write (again, the machine will do it for us), read (how many people read, anyway?), or formulate a cogent thought. Lord knows we all have trouble doing that.

What’s also interesting is that there is existing research that finds smartphones and social media have similar effects. Have you seen kids these days? They can barely function. That may be because they’ve grown up with immediate access to everything in the world in their pockets. When you have that kind of power, you’re already offloading your critical thinking—why try and learn or memorize anything when you can just look it up anytime you want? 

Reserach shows that even being around a phone, even if it’s turned off, reduces our cognitive function. We’re basically turning into cro-mags because of all this stuff, assuming we don’t make an effort to put our brains to work. That’s especially true for kids. 

A very boring “Terminator” sequel

What can we do about it? I’m not sure, I’m in the same boat as all of you: Playing with the new AI tools and trying not to devolve into a chimpanzee. I suppose the best thing to do is to not rely on this stuff too much. Write your own emails. Read some books. Take a walk. Talk to other human beings.

Otherwise, the machines win. Imagine a “Terminator” movie where the Terminator wins by simply doing everything for John Conner, and Conner gets so lazy and dumb that he just…chokes on a pretzel or something. The Terminator wins. 
Is that the future we’re staring at? Slack-jawed, and drooling?

Remember: You can reach me at sammbecker@gmail.com with your thoughts, insults, or anything else.

Stay vigilant, friends!