A recent David Brooks New York Times Op-Ed entitled “Are We Really Willing to Become Dumber?” reminded me about how human wisdom needs to be the balance to our burgeoning artificial intelligence. He highlights a recent study in which participants were asked to write essays. “Some of them used A.I. to write the essays, some wrote with the assistance of search engines (people without a lot of domain knowledge are not good at using search engines to identify the most important information), and some wrote the old-fashioned way, using their brains. The essays people used A.I. to write contained a lot more references to specific names, places, years and definitions. The people who relied solely on their brains had 60 percent fewer references to these things.” AI makes us sound sophisticated.
Here’s the problem: Those who used AI had great difficulty quoting from their LLM-generated paper, they hadn’t metabolized their learning. To quote Brooks, “In other words, more effort, more reward. More efficiency, less thinking. But here’s where things get scary. The researchers used an EEG headset to look at the inner workings of their subjects’ brains. The subjects who relied only on their own brains showed higher connectivity across a bunch of brain regions. Search engine users experienced less brain connectivity and A.I. users least of all.” The researchers conclude, “Collectively, these findings support the view that external support tools restructure not only task performance but also the underlying cognitive architecture.”
Thinking hard strengthens your mental capacity and the advent of AI means we’re robbing the brain of the firing of synapses that happen when we’re doing our own work. AI is here to stay and is meant to be our modern knowledge concierge. The genie is out of the bottle. Maybe we’re supposed to use our brain to distill wisdom in the 21st century? Our painful life lessons are often the raw material for our future wisdom. AI has no life lessons. It has suffered no pain.
I’ve defined wisdom as “metabolized experience mindfully shared for the common good.” There are three parts to this definition:
- “Metabolized experience” is seeing one’s life as the most exquisite exercise in experiential education. And, yet, we have precious few means to help people turn life lessons into a tangible art of living. This is part of the reason why MEA exists as the world’s first midlife wisdom school.
- “Mindfully shared” speaks to the idea that wisdom isn’t taught, it’s shared. But, it’s shared in a skillful and customized way. The “OK Boomer” meme started a few years ago because an older man was telling a younger woman how the world worked. War stories are not necessarily wisdom unless they’re relevant to the receiver.
- “For the common good” reminds us that, unlike being smart or savvy which can be hoarded selfishly, wisdom is a social good for the betterment of society.
In sum, at a time when nearly 100,000 knowledge workers have been laid off due to AI in the first half of this year, maybe it’s time for us to foster the birth of the wisdom economy in which we help people see the value of offering the world something that AI is not yet built for: creative innovation, experience-based intuition, authentic emotional intelligence, and values-based decision-making.
-Chip