AI thinking traps to be aware of
Depending on how we use AI and the extent to which we rely on it, it can create certain thinking or cognitive traps that have the potential to affect how we think.
This is especially true for young people who are still developing their cognitive capacities.
The following are not guaranteed outcomes about what AI will inevitably do to the cognitive skills of young people. They're the risks. But, there's no doubt that we're already seeing some of these impacts today.
Some of these concepts pre-date AI, but are taking on new life in this era. Others are wholly new phenomena that are emerging alongside the technology. All of them are worth understanding.
1. Cognitive offloading
What it is: Handing our thinking over to a tool. Humans have always done this – we use calculators, search engines, GPS. AI now allows us to offload far more complex forms of thinking.
Potential outcome: Cognitive muscles atrophy, affecting our ability to adequately develop judgment, discernment, complex reasoning, the ability to comprehend longer-form and/or complex text.
2. Automation bias
What it is: The tendency to trust that what a machine says is right. This behaviour becomes easier to fall into given how authoritative and confident AI-generated answers can sound. We may start to accept those answers over our own judgment, knowledge or even over explicit evidence that says something different.
Potential outcome: Healthy intellectual skepticism is turned off and we become more intellectually passive and pliable.
3. Intellectual helplessness
What it is: In the context of AI, this phenomenon takes hold when we lose the resilience required to struggle through and solve complex challenges because we’ve become used to instant and friction-free answers.
Potential outcome: We give up when tasks require a modicum of brain effort, self-infantilizing our intellectual development.
4. Epistemic dependence
What it is: A person has epistemic agency when they believe in their own capacity to acquire knowledge and verify facts. When we begin to view AI as an omniscient all-knowing oracle, we lose that agency.
Potential outcome: From politics to science to history, our sense of what is true is shaped by an AI, which not incidentally is corporate-owned.
5. Illusion of competence
What it is: When we mistake our access to summarized answers for actually possessing the knowledge that is contained or explained in the answer. In other words, we read an AI-generated blurb and think we are an expert.
Potential outcome: Satisfied with reading an AI summary, we no longer feel it necessary to dig any further – and then we make decisions or seek to persuade others based on something we don’t truly understand. This is very prevalent in social media.
6. Map-Territory Confusion
What it is: When we look at an AI-generated summary and forget that the real world is infinitely bigger, messier and more complicated than the text on the screen, which was generated through a mathematical process. We mistake the AI’s explanation for actual experience and knowledge of what it is describing.
Potential outcome: We lose our desire for details, nuance, context and perspective seeking. We lose confidence in our own eyes, memories and experiences. We forget to look beyond the slop.
7. Algorithimic Homogenization
What it is: The danger that everyone’ ideas, writing and creative work start sounding exactly the same. Because AI is trained to blend together millions of existing web pages, it tends to spit out predictable and middle-of-the-road answers.
Potential outcome: Original thinking is completely flattened out. We lose individual voices, and unique perspectives. Daring, original and wonderfully weird ideas dissipate because everyone is using the exact same machine to do their thinking for them. Everything just becomes sort of average and “normal.”
8. Automation Complacency
What it is: When we stop paying close attention to a machine’s work because we assume it is always working correctly. While automation bias is about believing the machine is right, complacency is worse. It’s about no longer bothering to check at all.
Potential outcome: We lose the habit – and eventually the skill – of doing our best to ensure the information we pass on is correct. We become purveyors of misinformation, unintentionally yet casually spreading major mistakes, incorrect AI facts (hallucinations) and perspectives grounded in falsehoods.
9. Loss of Cognitive Sovereignty
What it is: When we begin relying on AI to determine what we ourselves actually think, value or believe. Instead of using AI as an extra tool, we start outsourcing our inner decision-making and morals to an algorithm.
Potential outcome: We lose confidence in our own minds. We become unable to form independent opinions, make judgments or decide what matters to us without first consulting an AI system to tell us how to feel. We infantilize ourselves, which leaves us open to greater manipulation by others.
10.Algorithmic Herd Behaviour
What it is: The digital version of peer pressure, where entire demographics gets funnelled into thinking, buying and believing the exact same things because they are all being fed content by the same recommendation engines. Instead of humans organically sharing ideas, an algorithm rounds us up into massive, predictable cultural herds.
Potential outcome: Societies and culture lose their vibrancy – their diversity of thought, tastes and imagination – because the algorithms generate and reward compliance.