Sinead Bovell: The Great Cognitive Divide - How AI Is Rewiring Our Brains

[Celerity]

https://sineadbovell.substack.com/p/the-great-cognitive-divide

I was at a business lunch a few weeks ago. Investors, hedge fund managers, executives and the like. Naturally, AI made its way into the conversation. But unrelated to productivity or AI pilot projects, the discussion centered on how AI has already eroded the desire to properly draft emails (why draft an email when an AI can do it better?), but more importantly, the know-how to draft an email. “I feel like I can no longer spell or write well,” one of the investors confessed. Unsurprisingly, it was the younger folks at the table, those under 40, who led the discussion about the slow erosion of basic writing skills and the fading desire to write anything at all. Which aligns with the data: Millennials and Gen Z have adopted AI more quickly.

What is AI doing to our brains? And our memories?

A recent MIT study is shining a flashing red light on those answers. My social feeds have been flooded with posts and comments about it. People are scared, and rightfully so. It shows how AI use can weaken our cognitive capacity. Researchers split students into three groups: one wrote essays entirely on their own, one used a search engine, and one used an AI language model to draft and refine. They tracked the students’ brain activity, read the essays, and sat them down for interviews.



The results weren’t subtle. Students who leaned on AI remembered less and felt less connected to their work. Some didn’t even want to take ownership of large sections of “their” essays. Many couldn’t quote what they had “written” days later. The more the machine did, the less the brain did. The researchers called it cognitive debt: the mind’s muscle shrinks when we stop asking it to carry weight. We are exchanging our cognitive capacity for time. So what happens when the machine can handle baseline thinking and middle-of-the-road synthesis — the writing, summarizing, strategic proposals — and you don’t have to remember how? It will train a generation for mental atrophy by design, and we will watch our mind’s edge fade away. If we don’t fight our way up the cognitive ladder, we won’t be needed on it at all.

For some tech leaders, this is the inevitable reality. The goal of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the trillion-dollar race every AI company hopes to win, is literally to create systems just as good as the average human at nearly every task. We are moving toward a future where “AI will handle everything” — or so we’re told — and we’d best “start preparing” for that. With the exception of a few, I think most people (myself included!) wouldn’t be thrilled about the prospect of not needing to — or knowing how to — think. From a health perspective, “use it or lose it” is not just a catchy phrase. It is a physiological reality. A society without thinking skills could face faster cognitive decline and more unstable democracies. We already struggle to decipher fake news or think deeply about the intent behind polarizing content, and it hasn’t turned out well for us.

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https://sineadbovell.substack.com/

Sinead Bovell is a futurist and the founder of tech education company, WAYE.
An organization that prepares businesses and the next generation of leaders for a future shaped by advanced technologies.

https://www.sineadbovell.com/

Sinead advises C-suite executives and senior leadership across governments, global corporations, and startups alike, with a core focus on emerging and exponential technologies and their implications for economic and national security, as well as long-term business strategy and model adaptation. She is an 11-time United Nations speaker and has delivered formal addresses to presidents, royalty, and Fortune 500 leaders on topics ranging from synthetic biology to artificial intelligence. She currently serves as an expert advisor to the United Nations AI Advisory Body, focusing on the future of work and AI’s long-term trajectory.

Sinead is one of the most sought-after voices on artificial intelligence and the future of education. She has advised over 17,000 educators, government officials, and policymakers worldwide on redesigning education for the age of AI and emerging technologies. Her recent talk at SXSW on AI and the Future of Education was accredited by the Association of Texas Professional Educators for a CPE credit.

Sinead is a member of the Bretton Woods Committee, where she contributes to strengthening multilateral systems to address 21st-century global challenges. She is also a regular tech commentator for platforms such as CNN, NBC, and CTV, where she discusses the societal impact of emerging technologies.

Sinead was named one of the top 50 voices shaping the future by Afrotech, she received the Mozilla Rise 25 award for her work in championing the development of open and responsible AI ecosystems, and she was dubbed the AI educator for the non-nerds by Vogue magazine. Before founding WAYE, Sinead earned her MBA from the University of Toronto and worked as a management consultant at A.T. Kearney. Sinead holds a bachelor’s degree in finance with a minor in chemistry.

[FirstLight]

1. Wow... humans love to create their own demise, don't they?

I could not imagine being a teacher today and having to fight the uphill battle of getting kids to th8ink critically AND write their own thoughts instead of letting the comuter do it for them. (Honestly, I love writing, but if I could have had a bot do my algebra homework, i would have been so stoked!)

I guess being able to say I am a writer and was a journalist in the 90's will be a badge of honor. I actually wrote my own stuff! (and won a couple awards too)

[Hugin]

2. I'm not even sure if generative AI is that good at algebra.

Since it’s been trained on internet scrapings and I have never encountered a forum where there’s folks doing fancy algebra to impress each other showing their work, I’m guessing that it is not.

[EYESORE 9001]

3. Functioning in an idiocracy requires some neural rearrangement

I’ve been ranting about this thing happening since introduction of the pocket calculator. This is many orders of magnitude worse IMO.

[GJGCA]

4. Pocket calculator!?!

Why, I didn't even have a slide rule..

Slide rule! I was lucky to have an abacus to help with pencil and paper..

Pencil and paper!? I wrote with a piece of fireplace charcoal on the back of a shovel...

Fireplace!? We lived in a cardboard shack...

Forgive the foolishness, it's a serious subject, but could not hold back the Monty Python...

[EYESORE 9001]

5. I wasn't joking

Ask any of the various & sundry passersby to add two random 2-digit numbers together sans pen & paper.

[Ping Tung]

6. This song seems apropos