Since the printing press brought us books we have been divided in schools of thought. It happens with every big revolution, but how can we know which way it will go when we’re in the middle of this history?
Books were the devil’s work, they said, we would become mindless while escaping into written fantasy worlds. Then, mass academia.
The internet will make us lazy! Digital was the devil then, paper was the way. And yet, globalization boomed. Humans = connected.
So I’m led to another line of questioning, I think it’s clear we have to ask the same about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Will it follow the pattern and be our next ‘discovery of fire’? Or is this evolution actually leading us to decline?
Studies about how the brain is affected are increasing in number, but is it possible we’re simply following the same pattern, just this time with many more scientific tools to measure and overthink it? What I’m getting to here is that with every upgrade in technology that has modified daily life, there are always groups of people that fall into dependency and escapism. Then other groups that push the new tech to its maximum to historically further other fields of work.
When I start to use AI in the dependent not-analytical way, I can literally feel the mental blocks where I used to be able to think. More than two decades of life I was without these tools, and I survived, I wrote my essays with google and tears. So now what. I feel my brain turn to mush and… do nothing? Because thinking is hard and stressful. ?!?!?. Feels ridiculous in plain logic, but the internal experience feels like a battlefield of paralysis by lack-of-analysis. To think I used to get paralysis by analysis. Take me back to that, to the thinking. To before we all sounded like polite robots 100 times regurgitated.
The answer we are left with is more scientific than I currently understand, but essentially… brain = muscle, workouts = improvement through pain. We need to regain sight of the improvement aspect, the benefits of getting mentally buff.
How we can do that is obvious, no matter how much we feel the need to ask Chat for a 10-step guide to regaining mental power— NO! It starts here. We know what to do. Read. Learn. Write. Experiment. Live life to its fullest (that’s learning too).
We may be blind in the middle of history, but keeping our brains alive instead of zombie-ish might be one of the steps to take us on the non-apocalyptic path.
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