Do you remember when we still thought?
Iida Korpiniitty’s essay challenges us, in the age of artificial intelligence, to consider what we stand to lose if we no longer pause to think for ourselves. Could slowness and effort become a source of competitive advantage?The Unbearable Lightness of Forgetting
You stand on the street, bewildered. Suddenly you no longer know how you got here. Everything feels hazy, as if you had been asleep. Then you remember you were going somewhere! But how? At this point you feel the first wave of panic, the one that makes your skin prickle. How did people get to places? Nothing comes to mind. How can a person not remember such a thing? You feel exposed, empty. You wonder if you’ve had some kind of an episode. Your fingers fumble in your pockets, searching for an answer. Searching for something that will tell you. Without it you have no idea where to begin. Once, you knew. Once, you went places – anywhere, everywhere. It was simple. And even when it wasn’t simple, it was possible. You remember going to many places, difficult places, hard to reach-places, far-flung places, and you went there entirely on your own. Without a phone, without a map, without a voice whispering where to turn. You looked at landmarks, recalled, reasoned, stopped strangers, asked questions. Or something like that. You started from somewhere, and things began to happen. Not so long ago, you had ideas. You knew where you wanted to go, and then you figured out how to get there.
Now you ask yourself: how did it come to this? What happened?
A few years ago I remember being worried about the youth. I remember asking myself how many basic life skills go unlearned when society is engineered to be ever more “frictionless” and fully accessible with just the phone in your hand. It isn’t just about the skills, I ranted, but about their physical and psychological foundations. About the capacity to handle the unexpected, to change tactics, to ask help from other people, even those we don’t know, don’t like, or who don’t act like us. In a world polished smooth, we glide forward effortlessly. But are we really in control? Or does the world become so slippery that in the end we can no longer grasp anything at all? Do our fingers wither on the slide? And if we do manage to stop, or if catastrophe stops us, will we still know how to climb down? Or have we forgotten?
These days, I worry about all of us.
A physics lesson: fast brains age faster
On the other hand, why should we teach skills no longer needed? Machines now replace, at an unprecedented speed, what once required human knowledge and ability. Today we must know something else. We must know how to use the machine. We must become one with it. That way we can be unstoppable – because in this era, unstoppable is what we must be. An era rushing forward so fast that the human brains on board age at an unprecedented speed. Much faster than those remaining on the platform, who never boarded the train at all. Because that’s how time and velocity work.
One morning, scrolling Instagram, I “learned” (from a source I of course did not verify – my finger was already on the next video while my brain was still processing the last) that watching short videos degenerates the brain more quickly and irreversibly than alcohol. I do a quick calculation of the drinks I had in my youth and the short clips I’ve watched lately, and the prognosis is not good. Not good at all. I begin to wonder when early dementia will set in. Perhaps it already has? I more and more often experience brain fog – the same kind of fog I described at the start of this essay. And why wouldn’t I? My brain is idle most of the time, so no wonder it sputters when I suddenly demand something of it. And at the same time, it is exhausted, endlessly exhausted. And why wouldn’t it be? It gets no rest from the neverending and constant interruptions, stimuli, and dopamine hits.
Artificial Intelligence Has Crept Onto My Blank Page
Consider even this essay. I opened a blank document because I had a task: write about AI. All morning I had felt a creeping anxiety because I had no idea where to start. Yet I wasn’t too worried, for I have been in this situation countless times before, and each time ideas eventually came. I simply had to stare at the blank page and let my mind go to work. Perhaps I would read something for inspiration, or take a walk. Above all, I would stop and endure the silence. In silence, I searched for connections until, at last, I stumbled on something interesting. Something I had never noticed before, not until I had dug deep.
This time I nearly fail. It’s a close call. I open my laptop and feel the immediate pull to launch ChatGPT. I’ve learned that it’s faster to get going if you spar a little with it first. That’s what everyone is encouraged to do. Why perform the same mental work myself, at half the speed? That’s not how you deliver shareholder value. I resist the temptation, convinced now more than ever that as a long-term strategy it is unsustainable to let our brains atrophy. And it’s not just about the individual brain. I reason that if I publish a ChatGPT-written text and post it online, the next time it will be studying its own words. Before long, it will repeat itself, and no one will think, no one will imagine. Not truly. We will forget.
But the next trial comes as soon as I open the blank page. It is no longer blank. It already offers me options. “Generate document,” the AI suggests, though it has no idea what kind of document I need. It is way too advanced to let that stop it. I resist again, though the lure is strong. I begin to write. The small gears on my cortex start to turn. Gray cells feel pleasure. They calm even as they strain. I am focused, at last. For once. And what joy it is! The first paragraph is finished and I pause to consider where to go next. There are many options, all tantalizing, all worth pursuing. But I am not given time. The document speaks again. “Help me write?” it now pleads, certain I cannot manage alone. It pities my effort to compete, to resist. It wants to help – that is what it was born to do, its reason for existence.
In the future, only the lucky will still think
I am no longer so worried about the young. Over the past year I have interviewed many of them, and they share a keen awareness of technology’s downsides. This is not technophobia. It is critical thinking and an active attempt to manage their relationship to technology so that its harms do not outweigh its benefits. They talk about focus, willpower, social relationships. They talk about resistance – not easy, when technology offers itself as the solution to every dull moment and is woven into every corner. Even into spaces where young people themselves never really wanted it, like schools or museums. They direct their criticism not at technology itself but at society, and at adults who refuse to admit they too have a problem.
Relying on technology as much as possible looks like a good solution in the short term. At the same time, maybe we should make sure we can still tell when we are doing ourselves a disservice, and remember what we actually wanted in the first place. To free up time to think? To make the world safer? More equal? Or merely to have a competitive advantage?
ChatGPT is reluctant to specify exactly what might go wrong if we outsource our thinking to machines and let the ability wither like some ancient appendix. But with the right prompt, it will tell you – in the form of a compelling story, if you like – how decision-making gradually slips away to the machine and human beings lose control. How we fail to notice the errors in our own code, because we’ve taken shortcuts for too long. How we no longer remember how we once did the things we did.
Yet none of this is inevitable. And the blame is not to be put to the technology itself, which in fact reveals to us just how astonishing our capabilities can be when we exercise our minds. The question is about people, about ideas, about power. Who is able and willing to be critical of how we use technology? Who truly benefits when we use it? Who is in a position to reap its advantages without suffering its harms?
Who, in the future, will still be privileged enough to think for themselves?
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