The emergence of any developing, powerful, and omnipresent technology sparks discourse and advocates regulation. With the evolution of such a distinct technology as AI, a technology that has already seamlessly woven itself into so many parts of our lives, unforeseen consequences may already be upon us. AI seems to simplify lives, but at what cost?
Listen, I don’t see us getting full Age of Ultron, where AI aims to cleanse the world of what it computes its survival needs (elimination of humans), or at least I have no rational reason to think so… but… for this blog post’s sake, let’s consider an environment similar to what the current generation has experienced with the dawn of smartphones, social media, and general digitalization. Let’s consider the next generation that effortlessly integrates and takes full advantage of the tool.
An uproar of AI use, may sever more humanity and individuality than social media already has. A recent study exploring the impact on decision-making and laziness in education found that dependency on the homework-time-reducing tool saw significant negative changes in all dependent variables.
Now is this enough to say that AI makes us lazy and indecisive?
No, of course not, its context and experimental conditions make the insight subjective. Nonetheless, the intuition that if we continually rely on a software that reduces our opportunities to be productive, make decisions, and perform critical thinking, now that is something we should hold on to.
The otherside of the coin ought to be explored. AI is an amazing innovation that augments efficiency, provides varying perspectives, and continually improves. Wanting to abstain is almost as big of a fallacy as creating a dependency. It is the relationship with the tool that requires immediate and extensive attention.
References:
Ahmad, S. F., Han, H., Alam, M. M., Rehmat, M., Irshad, M., Arraño-Muñoz, M., & Ariza-Montes, A. (2023). Impact of artificial intelligence on human loss in decision making, laziness and safety in education. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 10(1), 1-14.
Vox. (2024). We’re already using AI more than we realize. [Video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsZ-lx_3eoM
Zhang, S., Zhao, X., Zhou, T., & Kim, J. H. (2024). Do you have AI dependency? The roles of academic self-efficacy, academic stress, and performance expectations on problematic AI usage behavior. International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 21(1), 34.
