Need for cognition
Writing in The Atlantic, David Brooks discusses how, as a technology, AI is used differently depending on predispositions:
The general pattern that the research points to is that many people don’t use the time they save using AI to do less; they use the time to take on new tasks. AI also seems to shift workers’ expectations, and their boss’s expectations, about how much they should accomplish in a day. Every hour feels more crowded, but also more frazzled. The ActivTrak researchers found that the time people spent on focused, uninterrupted work fell by 9 percent. There’s even a name for this mental state: “AI brain fry.”
In some sense this is normal. Every time some new labor-saving technology is introduced, there are experts (the ones who know a lot about technology but not much about psychology) who predict that people will use the technology to make life easier. Soon we’ll all be enjoying 15-hour workweeks! Instead, many people use the technology to make their life more frenetic and full. Planes, trains, and automobiles are technologies that save time and effort by making travel faster. They also enable people to take a lot more trips.
I’d say that a guiding principle of the emerging AI age is this: When intelligence is plentiful, volition is valuable. The people who are going to make a difference are not the ones who seek relaxation and passively use AI to work less. They are the ones who will seek improvement and actively wrestle with AI to develop their own mental capabilities and accomplish more.
In other words, what will differentiate people is not how smart they are but their relationship to mental effort. Right now, some people have what psychologists call a high need for cognition. They enjoy thinking hard. These are the people who enjoy playing difficult games and reading dense books. On the other end of the spectrum, there are the cognitive misers, the people who find it unpleasant to think hard and take any opportunity not to do it. In the middle are the people who have a medium need for cognition. They will put in the effort when they really care about something, but they don’t intrinsically enjoy it. Need for cognition correlates with intelligence but is not the same thing. We all know a lot of really smart people who don’t like to work hard.
Brooks comes up with a typology:
- The Productive Passengers. People with a low need for cognition will tend to use AI to think less. Their great gain is that AI will make them more productive because it makes tasks so easy. Their great loss will be that AI will diminish their mental capacities because it makes tasks so easy.
[...]
- The Reluctant Optimizers. People with a medium need for cognition will understand that AI might hollow them out. That prospect will really bother them. They will resolve, earnestly and with good intentions, to not let themselves fall victim. But in the crowded and stressful rush of everyday life, they will get sucked in. Their resolve will fail and they’ll become overreliant on the bots.
[...]
The Mental Marathoners. Now we get to the high-need-for-cognition people and how they will fare in the coming age: kind of like marathoners, I suspect. The automobile is a perfectly good technology for traveling 26.2 miles. There is no practical reason that any person should train themselves to run that distance. But some people do. They want to put in the effort because they want to accomplish things—they want to expand their capacities.
I think his hand-wringing about AI creating a "mental underclass" is overblown, and the typology is a little twee, but I do think Brooks is onto something with some people's "need" for cognition. And I find it interesting that he doesn't discuss neurodiversity at all, to be honest.
Source: The Atlantic