Metacognitive Laziness

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We have a fairly good understanding of how the brain's mechanics work, specifically the squishy parts that can be dissected and scanned.

But we don’t exactly understand how those squishy parts produce the thing we call “thought.”

We generally assume that language crafts our reality and that words are the building blocks that help structure language, resulting in meaning.

When we put all that together inside ourselves, we call it “thinking”.

That’s probably a dramatic oversimplification, but I’m not a neuroscientist, nor am I a practicing linguist or philosopher.

However, there is a problem with how we’ve developed our understanding of these brain things.

Most research conducted in the field of cognition has been carried out on university and college campuses in the English-speaking world.

As a result, it doesn’t do a very good job of representing the majority of people on the planet who don’t speak English and haven’t gone to college.

Add to this lack of understanding a tendency to create new technologies, from the printing press, to the paperback, to the internet, to media that may or may not be social, all the way to artificial intelligence, which keeps reshaping how we teach, learn and render words.

In the exercise of reshaping words, we inadvertently change how we think. Which resets the human knowledge experiment before we can even hypothesize how “thought” worked in the first place.

Back in 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote an essay in The Atlantic asking the salient question, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

Carr speculated that his use of the Internet, and specifically an overreliance on Google Search, was changing his brain in ways he wasn’t happy about.

He wrote in the piece, “Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think.”

His question was fascinating enough that a group of fine folks at the Pew Research Center did, you know, some research on the topic.

Cutting to the chase a bit, Pew posited that Nicholas Carr was wrong: Google does not make us stupid.

Google might just (again) be guilty of reshaping how we think and what we think in a way that doesn’t result in stupidity, but definitely changes our brains.

Stephen Downes from the National Research Council of Canada was a participant in the Pew study. He had a nice way of framing the Google conundrum. He wrote, “It’s a mistake to treat intelligence as an undifferentiated whole. No doubt we will become worse at doing some things (‘more stupid’), requiring rote memory of information that is now available through Google. But with this capacity freed, we may (and probably will) be capable of more advanced integration and evaluation of information (‘more intelligent’).”

Both Carr’s original essay and the subsequent Pew research were conducted before the widespread adoption of smartphones, before the proliferation of social media, before TikTok started bloating our brains, and before the current AI era.

That’s a lot of potential brain changes.

John Nosta, a leading voice in the convergence of technology and humanity, recently asked a different question: “What if you outsourced your thoughts to a machine that speaks with flawless confidence but understands nothing?”

Sounds risky, right?

But that’s what we are doing when we give that act of writing, reading and processing language to a tool that is really just a plausible sentence generator.

But even more than risky, it’s lazy.

Nosta wrote a different piece on the impact of being metacognitively lazy. He cautioned, “It starts small by letting simple things like autocomplete finish your sentence or letting search results decide which sources you’ll read or cite. Soon, you’re letting the chatbot write your first draft and then your second. Each step feels efficient, even smart. But taken together, they create a cognitive drift away from the friction that makes thinking alive and human.”

If someone asked you if you wanted to be more alive or less alive, what would you tell them?

We need to remember that our AI “friends” don’t know what a sentence is or what words mean; they just know how to put words together in such a convincing way that we forget that it doesn’t know these things.

And while you ponder that, perhaps you'd like to get some exercise, eat a salad, and pick up a book and read something.

Think of it as a workout and meal plan for your lazy brain.

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