Some researchers believe that AI is making us more dumb. We have listening the same from the calculator

The AI ​​is making us dumb. A recent study has revived an old fear: that of technology by decorcing our cognitive abilities. It has happened with writing, calculators, television or internet. With the irruption of Great language modelsAI is in the center of the debate, but does it really make us more dumb?

A MIT study. A few days ago a study conducted by MIT researchers About the “cognitive cost of using chatgpt in the educational context of writing an essay.” In the study, which lasted four months and had 54 participants, they wrote an essay a month while monitored by electroencephalography. The participants were divided into three groups: one used chatgpt, another used the search for Google and the third did not use any tool. The group that used Chatgpt gave the worst results in brain activity and also became more lazy with each essay they wrote.

It has logic. If we use a tool to do a homework for us, the natural thing is to stop doing that task manually. Thanks to the calculators we no longer need to do great operations by hand. Having a GPS we arrive at our destination without having to memorize the route and with a search engine like Google it is no longer necessary to know by memory all the rivers of Spain. With the AI ​​we already saw how Some programmers no longer know. The key question that arises is: does this dependence imply a real decrease in our intelligence?

A historical fear. It is not the first time that we fear that a new technology will become less intelligent, in fact it is a constant fear throughout history. In the 370 AC, Socrates already questioned if the writing was weakening our ability to memorize (the funny thing is that he did it In a book). With the pocket calculators came the fear that we forget to perform math operations by hand. A fear that It was fulfilled (Who makes divisions by hand having calculator?), But that does not mean that we are worse in mathematics. In fact, this Meta analysis He concluded that calculators do not negatively affect performance and even improve the attitude towards mathematics.

Technology and brain. For years we wanted to know the effects of new technologies on our brain and television has been in the spotlight. In This studythe researchers verified how seeing films our brain entered a mode of “low demand” similar to that of deep sleep. In This other study They conclude that seeing a lot of television is associated with a lower volume of gray matter. Something similar concluded This study about the effect of playing a lot of video games.

The Internet was a radical change in the way we access information. In This 2011 studythe ‘Google effect’ was coined or how, when we know that we can access the information whenever we want, we tend to memorize less specific data. Instead, we remember better how and where to find that information.

Without clear evidence. Studies that say that technology makes us dumb either lazy There are many, but there are also others who claim that There is no clear evidence that it is so. The appearance of new technologies changes the way we entertain ourselves, we look for information or work, but that does not necessarily imply that there is long -term damage in our cognitive ability.

The comparative advantage. The theory of Comparative advantage It was developed by David Ricardo in the early nineteenth century in the context of international trade and is defined as the ability to produce a good or service at a lower opportunity cost than others. In his Column in The Free Presseconomist Tyler Cowen applies this theory to the IA issue. The opportunity cost in this case is the time and energy that we dedicate to a task or, as they say in the study of MIT, the cognitive cost.

Less effort does not mean more silly. Following the concept of comparative advantage, memorizing the capitals of all countries would mean a high cognitive cost, greater effort. Here the AI ​​would have a comparative advantage over us because its effort is almost null. On the other hand, when performing more creative and analytical tasks, such as writing an essay on geopolitics, we have the comparative advantage. We can interpret it as if it reduces our capacity, or we can interpret it as AI is an assistant who deals with more repetitive tasks so that we can focus on the most important.

It is not the AI, it is we. Returning to the analogy with the calculator: it is not the same to use it to make complex operations than to depend on it to add 1+2. Obviously, what chatgpt does Little has to do compared to the calculator. The abilities of language models are infinitely higher and the risk to depend too much on it for too many things It is very real. However, There are psychologists who affirm That the impact on our intelligence will depend on the use we make of it. As the psychologist Jason Lodge says in This great articleAI is the electric bike of the mind.

To close, the best example I can give you is this article. Reading all the studies that I have cited and draw conclusions would probably have taken more than one working day. What I have done is ask Gemini, Chatgpt and Perplexity to summarize some of these texts. It has helped me to understand everything better and faster. Or I could have asked for That the whole text and copy it literally And I wouldn’t have learned anything.

Image | Gemini

In Xataka | Chatgpt is taking some people to the edge of madness. Reality is less alarmist and much more complex