The temptation of artificial intelligence
In Tuesday's ARA, they published a tweet from a professor of computational cognitive science (the name of the specialty serves as an argument from authority and makes you perk up your ears), in which she quoted another professor from California, saying: "Colleagues from various sectors are explaining it directly to her at an astonishing rate."
As if we didn't have enough with the distraction and lack of attention and concentration that social media leads us to, now a tool has appeared that is potentially capable of replacing our brains. And judging by what these two professors are saying, the replacement is happening fast.
What do you ask AI? What do you use it for? I'll start: for articles, never. That would be a trap with very short legs and a direct path to unemployment. But I do ask it for things I'm sure I don't know and that no human or any book I have nearby can tell me. And I never ask it for things that, if I think about it a little, I could come up with or solve myself. In fact, I've discovered the small pleasure of first formulating an argument on a topic and then asking the machine what it would say. From a humanistic perspective, its answers aren't far removed from those of a person who has actually touched and studied the topic for a while.
What I have noticed, though, is the temptation, of course. Why ponder it if AI could structure it for me in a few seconds? The answer is that I don't want to outsource creativity, memory, reading, or critical thinking, because I'm certain that the function is inherent to the individual. And it's not a matter of atrophying it.
