What is “AI Brain Fry.” Are you a “Productive Passenger”, “Reluctant Optimizer” or a “Mental Marathoner”

Researchers from ActivTrak, UC Berkeley, MIT, and others have conducted studies analyzing workers’ digital activity and cognitive responses to AI tools. Their findings reveal that AI has increased multitasking and expectations, intensifying work rather than easing it, with profound effects on motivation, mental effort, and cognitive function.

What if you’ve never done the work to form your own worldview or build your own knowledge base? You’re going to engage in what the experts call “cognitive surrender.” You’re going to believe everything the bot tells you, head off in whatever direction the bot suggests. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School programmed an AI to occasionally give wrong answers. The humans accepted its errors as true 80 percent of the time.

How do we train people to see their life as a hero’s journey in which they take on difficult missions that they may fail at and that will certainly involve pain and suffering? How do we form people so they have an explorer’s heart, a willingness to endure, an ability to struggle on, even when their body and mind are telling them to give up, to reach new destinations and figure stuff out?

Despite what the rationalists used to tell us, life is not mostly about solving problems. Any computer can do that. Life is a pilgrimage, a journey—it’s going somewhere, growing from experience, expanding yourself, reaching for some possibility that you do not yet possess. The defining human features therefore are propulsions—the drives that push us to take on mental effort and overcome difficulty—and aspirations: knowing where you want to go, what purpose you serve, what kind of person you’d like to be.

Schools and organizations will need to shift focus toward cultivating volition and motivation to counteract these trends.

The People Who Will Thrive in the AI Age
By David Brooks, The Atlantic