Last week, an Edubrain survey of 3,500 Americans aged 18-60 uncovered something many of us have long suspected.
Many adults, just like schoolchildren, are surprisingly willing to outsource thinking to anyone or anything that will do it for them.
Yes, I’m talking about AI, and the damage it is already doing to our collective cognitive capability.
The adoption rates by age are insightful: 37% of millennials (30-45yrs) use AI daily, compared to 25% of Gen Zers (14-29 yrs), and 19% of Gen Xers (46-61yrs). Nothing wrong with that, of course. When used correctly, AI is a wonderful tool for refining thoughts and testing ideas.
But, as we all know, not everyone uses AI intelligently. In the survey, 36% admit that they’d be embarrassed by the ways they’re routinely using AI. 18% say they’ve used AI for something illegal! And, get this, 35% have asked an AI tool to *predict the future* WTAF?!
Stats like these show how poorly many people understand how AI works and what it is genuinely useful for. They also remind us how quickly we can fall for AI’s promise of instant answers and its apparent omnipotence.
So, for the record, repeat after me: AI is little more than a very clever language pattern-matching machine. It generates plausible answers, not the truth, and presents them to you in ways that make you think it’s doing something intelligent.
Crucially, AI cannot and never will accurately predict the future! It’s designed for probability, not prophecy.
If you are already embarrassed by how you use AI, take comfort in your self-awareness. That awareness is the first step in Future-Readying your career. It means you still have the capacity to re-engage your brain before cognitive atrophy sets in.
The bottom line: Please do not outsource your critical thinking to a machine. That is one thing a machine should never replace.
