How to avoid being downgraded by AI?

Photo by Igor Omilaev on Unsplash

Last year, along with the hype surrounding ChatGPT, numerous useful tools powered by AI emerged. We’ll have more AI applications in the future. Although these tools are very useful, there’s a significant risk that we would be downgraded by them.

For sure, there are many things we’d like AI to do for us, and it’s no harm even if we lose the ability to do them. For example, I’d be very happy if I could forget how to park a car because the car could just park itself perfectly.

However, there are several crucial skills that we don’t want to be downgraded or weakened. These skills include thinking, communicating, and interpersonal skills. To live a good life and figure out how to deal with the existential risks provoked by AI, we need to think; to express ourselves and collaborate with each other, we need to communicate; and to live in society and have meaningful connections with other people, interpersonal skills are essential.

As you may have noticed, smartphones and social media have already downgraded our social skills. It is, in my opinion, the main cause of the increasingly polarized world. To avoid being downgraded again by AI, there are several things we can do:

1. Use summarization tools as sparingly as possible. It’s very convenient to let AI summarize a long article or a lengthy video for us, but slowly we may lose the ability to think for a long time and the ability to gain insights from what we read and watch. Yes, we’re always thinking along while we’re reading.
2. Don’t simply let AI write your stuff. Like a writer once said, writing is thinking with a pen. Our memory is not reliable, but by writing, we can think continuously without forgetting what was on our mind one day ago. If we always let AI write our stuff, gradually it’ll weaken our writing and thinking skills. Worse, we won’t be able to tell whether what AI wrote is good or not because we can’t write well anymore.
3. Talk to people first. Compared to human beings, AI companions are always patient, agreeable, and available. Confronting conflicts, dealing with disagreements, and expressing vulnerability are difficult, but they’re essential social skills. If everyone just wants to talk to AI and doesn’t know how to deal with other human beings anymore, AI will surely take over the world even before it becomes super-intelligent. So when we feel lonely or need connection, we should first try to talk to a person, no matter how afraid we are of being ignored or misunderstood.
4. Learn a foreign language. Now AI can do translation almost perfectly, that’s why many people claim that it’s not necessary to learn foreign languages anymore. But when we speak a foreign language, we don’t firstly think in our native tongue and translate it into the foreign language. Instead, we think directly in the foreign language. A foreign language has normally been developed by people who speak it for generations. When we learn a foreign language, we’re also learning about a culture and imagining a lifestyle. In this globalized world, we can understand each other more and have fewer international conflicts if we keep learning foreign languages instead of using AI translators.

By using but not being downgraded by AI, we’re in a better position to deal with many crises we’re facing. Even only from a career development perspective, keeping these skills will give you a huge competitive advantage in the workplace. Yes, you’re not getting better, but others are getting worse ;)

(I wrote this article on my own. ChatGPT only checked the grammar and provided suggestions.)