The People Who Will Thrive in the AI Age - The Atlantic

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Remember when AI was going to take away our jobs and leave humans with nothing to do? So far, that doesn’t seem to be happening. Researchers from ActivTrak analyzed the digital activity of more than 10,000 workers and found that when people adopted AI, their work life became more intense, not less. The time that these early adopters spent on email, messaging, and chat apps more than doubled. Their use of business software rose by 94 percent.<br>Researchers from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business found that when using AI, workers started taking on tasks that they had previously outsourced, because activities such as coding and engineering became easier to do. They squeezed in work bursts in the evening, on weekends, in waiting rooms, and whenever else they had a spare moment and AI was handy. They also did a lot more multitasking, supervising a bunch of bots doing different things simultaneously.<br>The general pattern that the research points to is that many people don’t use the time they save using AI to do less; they use the time to take on new tasks. AI also seems to shift workers’ expectations, and their boss’s expectations, about how much they should accomplish in a day. Every hour feels more crowded, but also more frazzled. The ActivTrak researchers found that the time people spent on focused, uninterrupted work fell by 9 percent. There’s even a name for this mental state: “AI brain fry.”<br>In some sense this is normal. Every time some new labor-saving technology is introduced, there are experts (the ones who know a lot about technology but not much about psychology) who predict that people will use the technology to make life easier. Soon we’ll all be enjoying 15-hour workweeks! Instead, many people use the technology to make their life more frenetic and full. Planes, trains, and automobiles are technologies that save time and effort by making travel faster. They also enable people to take a lot more trips.<br>Rogé Karma: Three ways to think about AI and jobs<br>I’d say that a guiding principle of the emerging AI age is this: When intelligence is plentiful, volition is valuable. The people who are going to make a difference are not the ones who seek relaxation and passively use AI to work less. They are the ones who will seek improvement and actively wrestle with AI to develop their own mental capabilities and accomplish more.<br>In other words, what will differentiate people is not how smart they are but their relationship to mental effort. Right now, some people have what psychologists call a high need for cognition. They enjoy thinking hard. These are the people who enjoy playing difficult games and reading dense books. On the other end of the spectrum, there are the cognitive misers, the people who find it unpleasant to think hard and take any opportunity not to do it. In the middle are the people who have a medium need for cognition. They will put in the effort when they really care about something, but they don’t intrinsically enjoy it. Need for cognition correlates with intelligence but is not the same thing. We all know a lot of really smart people who don’t like to work hard.<br>As things stand today, people will have very different experiences with AI.<br>The Productive Passengers. People with a low need for cognition will tend to use AI to think less. Their great gain is that AI will make them more productive because it makes tasks so easy. Their great loss will be that AI will diminish their mental capacities because it makes tasks so easy.<br>God seems to have been a puritan. He created us to be the kind of creatures who don’t experience gain without some pain, don’t gain reward without some effort. That’s as true in the world of knowledge work as it is in the world of bodybuilding. Humans learn best when they are in the zone of optimal difficulty, when engaged in tasks that are not so hard as to be overwhelming but not so easy as to require no work.<br>AI is going to push low-effort people out of the zone of optimal difficulty. One research team led by Nataliya Kosmyna from the MIT Media Lab found that people’s brain connectivity declines by as much as 55 percent when they are using ChatGPT compared with when they are not using it to perform similar tasks. Vivienne Ming, a co-founder of Possibility Sciences, found that when people were using AI, their gamma-wave activity—a sign of cognitive effort—dropped by roughly 40 percent.<br>This has predictable effects on how much people remember from their AI-assisted work. It has equally predictable effects on their thinking skills. A study by Michael Gerlich from SBS Swiss Business School found “a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities.” At first, AI sucks you in. You really do become more productive when using it. But then it threatens to hollow you out, as you become less capable and less knowledgeable. The saddest cases are...