AI and Cognitive-Developmental Progress
Dear Reader, please, after you finish reading this post, do read its sibling post, AI as Cognitive-Developmental Progress Decay. Or, better yet, read them with both posts open side-by-side, one paragraph at a time.
I just finished fixing my toilet. I used AI to help me. In retrospect, I don't think I could have done it without AI. The fix was obvious, but there's a good chance I would not have noticed it "on my own" without assistance from AI.
I would have needed to pay 25% more attention to the right part of what I was looking at. It's possible I would have done that, but I had already stared at the tank unsuccessfully, thinking about what part to try adjusting for 5 minutes before I got to the point of desperation where I pulled up 4o.
It is amazing that 4o could talk me through this plumbing problem with an understanding of what I was showing it via live video and respond to me like a daemon plumber. Even though it was just a minor plumbing problem, I can't help but feel a little excited about this interaction. I suspect I will be able to address this particular plumbing problem on my own if it occurs again.
And lately I have noticed more moments like this coming up. Moments where the assistance I receive from AI lets me do something I could not otherwise have done — where AI unlocks an affordance for me or gets me past a constraint.
I can read more than I otherwise would when I lock in my attention using TTS via Speechify.
I can often figure out the 30% of important-to-me information in a journal article within a minute with the right prompt to an AI.1
When I was trying to fix the toilet on my own, I was not noticing the subtle visual cues that were hiding the answer to this problem in my built environment. I had already tried looking pretty hard, but I wasn't directing my attention to the right part of what I was seeing. My pretty-good-but-sometimes-hallucinating generated guardian angel was key to helping me do this.
Still, I am definitely also worried I could become overreliant on AI. I mean, I was using AI to fix my toilet. I do think AI can contribute to a person’s cognitive-developmental decay.
But increasingly often, when I work on a task with assistance from AI, I find myself amazed at the things I can do.
To avoid leaving this on the kind of ambiguous film ending that my mother finds so annoying, I will note that I think the solution to this is honing the skill of knowing when to use the AI and when to intentionally do without.
Still, often spending the same minute skimming the article and using a basic "find" function would get me nearly as good results. Not always, though!