artificial intelligence

Think Again About Outsourcing Your Thinking 2.0 (if you can)

/ SupremeCmdr / 1 Comment

Michael Gerlich, head of the Centre for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability at SBS Swiss Business School, began studying the impact of generative AI on critical thinking because he noticed the quality of classroom discussions decline. Sometimes he’d set his students a group exercise, and rather than talk to one another they continued to sit in silence, consulting their laptops. He spoke to other lecturers, who had noticed something similar. Gerlich recently conducted a study, involving 666 people of various ages, and found those who used AI more frequently scored lower on critical thinking. (As he notes, to date his work only provides evidence for a correlation between the two: it’s possible that people with lower critical thinking abilities are more likely to trust AI, for example.) Like many researchers, Gerlich believes that, used in the right way, AI can make us cleverer and more creative – but the way most people use it produces bland, unimaginative, factually questionable work. Are we living in a golden age of stupidity? – https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/18/are-we-living-in-a-golden-age-of-stupidity-technology

Yikes.

Some Common Sense on Artificial Intellignce

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If you’re using these systems for anything that matters, you need a verification pass that goes way beyond a lazy skim. That means detail-oriented human work — you must check every claim, every diagram, every link, every word, every line of code, every outcome and citation and fact. And who’s best positioned to verify? The very people who are already good at whatever the AI is trying to do: the workers it’s supposed to replace.

Doctors can check medical claims. Senior programmers can check AI coding outputs. Strong copywriters can check that whatever GPT writes sings — they know a good turn of phrase when they read it and can make sure each paragraph flows from the one before it.

That’s the biggest irony of AI work. If you’re not already good at the task it’s doing, you can’t tell if what it generates is good. You don’t have the knowledge or the context. If you don’t know French, then you don’t know if a French translation sounds clunky or if you just told someone to eat shit in your new commercial because of new slang that sounds like the phrase you translated. No, AI won’t take all the jobs. Here’s why. – https://www.freethink.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-wont-take-all-the-jobs

The full essay is worth reading. Enjoy!