We’re all using AI in some form whether we realize it or not. It’s built into so many things we use on a daily basis. I avoid it except for the AI search results that are automatic. But I never take the summary of the info as accurate. I’ll go through all the links the AI used to come up with the summary and then draw my own conclusions.
Cognitive offloading will lead to cognitive atrophy. If you take a forklift to the gym to lift the weights for you what do you think is going to happen ?
The idea in theory at least, is that AI serves as your "co-pilot", freeing up mental capacity of the mundane for the more complex. I think that people who have been around modern tech exclusively in their adult lives, that may very well be true, but for Gen Alpha, maybe even the youngest Gen Z, its just going to be woven in their fabric of day to day life. However, they could very well be challenged by a new set of problems that require mental capacity we can't yet anticipate. ~10 years ago, we didn't really anticipate the issues around AI short of a handful of movies that were imagining a future: 2001 Space Odyssey, War Games, The Terminator, Ex Machina, Blade Runner etc. So, now, we're dedicating a lot of mental capacity on how to best use and not use AI.
But then there are the unanticipated consequences. I don't recall anyone expressing concern about AI generated music, for example and, yet, here we are with a AI generated song on the "country" charts, all of the revenue simply going to the publishing company instead of writers. What's going to stop the streaming services from just generating their own AI music and serving that up in favor of human generated music and then just keeping all of the money? Same for scripts, books, film etc. Of course, there could also emerge a future where their is a total backlash against anything AI generated presented as art, solutions etc.
Anyway, all of that to say that I think we replace one set of problems with another. Afterall, calculators were controversial in math classes BITD, but they opened up the ability to do much more complex math at increasingly lower levels of education. While you may not be manually doing the computations, you still have to understand a certain amount of complex math in order to determine the solution. A math professor from the 1950s might be horrified at the idea of modern calculators, but, at the same time, might be unable to pass the equivalent class to the one he taught without the use of a calculator.
Its not necessarily that we are using a a forklift to lift the weights for us, its that the forklift is lifting one set of weights while we are lifting another. In theory, at least.