AI is fast food for the brain

It’s usually not a good day when your accountant says something that sends a shiver up your spine. Yet this had nothing to do with my finances and everything to do with a decision big technology firms had made that I somehow hadn’t noticed. “It’s incredibly annoying!” he exclaimed when asked about his GenAI use, something I’ve been doing with everyone lately. “Everything I do, even just writing an email, AI keeps bugging me and offering to help. I have to make a conscious effort to say ‘no.’” As someone who’s made a career out of understanding how we think and behave, I began to picture what this meant for the brain of anyone who uses a computer or phone, which is basically everyone, and my brain started to explode. It turns out that the people building our digital world made the quiet decision around 2024 to have generative artificial intelligence offer help on nearly every task, rather than let users seek input as needed. Whether you are writing an email, building a presentation, creating an image, or developing a critical business strategy, GenAI now pops in and encourages you to use it so you don’t have to think as hard. Put simply, this means humans today need to put in menta…