Keep thinking; it’s worth the trouble
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The term ‘cognitive offloading’ precedes the current generation of AI products. It was coined in a paper written in 2016 by Evan Risko and Sam Gilbert. In that paper, the term referred to the externalisation of reasoning and memory, including practices as advanced as using Internet search engines to find answers to questions, or as basic as tying knots in handkerchiefs to remind yourself that you have something to remember. It suggested that, although the practice has been around as long as humans have been able to manipulate their environment, offloading cognition could impair the ability to reason and remember, or be responsible for more subtle effects, such as undermining people’s confidence in their own thought and memory. The paper concluded that more research was required, particularly into metacognition: the practice of thinking about thinking.
Ten years later, the need for that research seems even more pressing. We have more tools on which to offload our cognition, and more people who are using them to do just that. Sometimes this offloading is explicit and deliberate, such as when somebody asks an LLM-based product to produce a business strategy or write an essay. But sometimes it is implicit and incidental, such as when somebody asks such a product to draft an email or summarise a document for them. They might think that they are merely offloading the work of typing or scanning mundane verbiage, but their choice means that there are thoughts that they will not think.
Fortunately, the research is under way: there are many people designing, carrying out and publishing insights about the impact that LLM usage has on our ability to reason and remember. Unfortunately, that research is far from conclusive. Some papers say that, used well, AI can help people think. Others say that any usage erodes cognitive skills. At least one much-cited paper has been retracted. Given that we are still less than four years from the launch of ChatGPT, before which most people did not even imagine that such tools existed, or that they could use them in their everyday lives, it’s not surprising that findings are mixed and opinions are divided.
What should we do while we are waiting for definitive results? Should we abstain from using AI tools at all, in case they melt our brains? Or should we embrace them wholeheartedly on the basis that there is no conclusive reason not to?
I believe that the answer lies in that word in the paper from 2016: metacognition, or thinking about thinking. Humans have offloaded our cognition for millennia, and, if we have been paying attention, we have formed an idea of what works and what doesn’t work. We know, when revising for an exam, that writing knowledge down can help us remember, but we won’t be able to take what we’ve written down into the examination room. When we are trying to solve a relationship problem, we may ask our friends for advice, but we know that we have to make the final choices, and it is better if we have thought those choices through to the point where we feel that they are ours.
When we use tools such as LLMs, I think we should be doing the same. We should ask ourselves why we should trust the results we get. We should ask ourselves whether we would be better off doing the reasoning ourselves. We should ask ourselves which thoughts we are choosing not to think, and whether that makes us and our choices better or worse.
One of the podcasts I listen to each week is the Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe, and I recommend it as one of the best ways to get your science news (it’s also the first place I heard the word ‘metacognition’). The hosts often deal with claims that a particular food is either a nutritional catastrophe or a cure for all ills, or that a particular health practice is either dangerous and damaging or the secret to a longer life. They always conclude that the best way to stay healthy is to eat a variety of foods, mostly vegetables, in moderation, and to exercise regularly.
The habits of eating well and exercising regularly can be difficult to maintain in a world full of easy temptations to indulgence and leisure, but we know that is what we should do. I think we should add the habits of reasoning about and remembering the things that matter to us, even when surrounded by tools that claim to reason and remember for us. And I’m willing to bet that, when the research is complete and a consensus is reached, that’s what it will say too.
