Nick Routledge@nick_routledge
Reply to @suzania

@suzania Succinctly stated by Cal Newport in The Chronicle of Higher Education: archive.ph/QdPAy

Where I do get concerned is when Al is used not to augment but to
automate thought. This is what I'm seeing a lot of students fall prey to.
They use Al to spare them from having to reach high peaks of cognitive
engagement or concentration. Think about having to write something
and facing a blank screen. Blank-screen writing is hard. You might want
to avoid that cognitive strain. So you get a good enough draft from Al
and maybe edit it. You are spared cognitive strain. That worries me
because cognitive strain is at the core of the entire post-Paleolithic
human experience. It’s at the core of all big ideas. It's at the core of
empathy, morality, ethics, notions of justice and human rights and
religion and philosophy. So there is absolutely something to the
humanistic critique of AL. We don’t want to automate away hard thought. Yes, automate drudgery. But automating hard thought is a dangerous direction to go.
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Where I do get concerned is when Al is used not to augment but to automate thought. This is what I'm seeing a lot of students fall prey to. They use Al to spare them from having to reach high peaks of cognitive engagement or concentration. Think about having to write something and facing a blank screen. Blank-screen writing is hard. You might want to avoid that cognitive strain. So you get a good enough draft from Al and maybe edit it. You are spared cognitive strain. That worries me because cognitive strain is at the core of the entire post-Paleolithic human experience. It’s at the core of all big ideas. It's at the core of empathy, morality, ethics, notions of justice and human rights and religion and philosophy. So there is absolutely something to the humanistic critique of AL. We don’t want to automate away hard thought. Yes, automate drudgery. But automating hard thought is a dangerous direction to go.