Episode transcription

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Transcript


Fabrice Neuman (00:00)
Hi everyone and welcome to the Human Pulse Podcast where we talk about living well with technology. I'm Fabrice Neuman.

Anne Trager (00:06)
And I'm Anne Trager.

Fabrice Neuman (00:08)
We are recording this on March 23rd, 2025.

Anne Trager (00:12)
Human pulse is never longer than 30 minutes, so let's get started.

Fabrice Neuman (00:16)
Okay, let's get started. And with the question of the day, is AI making us stupid?

We had several discussions about it because of a few articles talking about a new PISA study, PISA, standing for Program for International Student Assessment, which is part of the OECD. A study showing that tech in general and AI in particular was basically transforming our brains into useless mush. Okay, I'm exaggerating just a bit, but...

Anne Trager (00:45)
Yikes.

Fabrice Neuman (00:49)
Talking about that, it reminded you of a great article from The New Yorker with the title, “What if the Attention Crisis is All a Distraction” by Daniel Immerwahr and published on January 20th, 2025. This article discusses whether today's world changes our capacity to keep our focus on whichever subject for a long enough time and whether it is or not a bad thing.

And this article does a really good job to show how ageless this question is, giving lots of examples of how new tech, quote unquote, as you'll see, could often make people draw conclusions we find weird today. And so I wanted to quote a part of the article I liked very much, which is this, quote, I am particularly fond of from “a hand-wringing essay by Nathaniel Hawthorne from 1843”—Remember that date, 1843—“Hawthorne warns of the arrival of a technology so powerful that those born after it will lose the capacity for mature conversation. They will seek separate corners rather than common spaces, he prophesies. Their discussions will devolve into accurate debates and old mortal intercourse will be chilled with a fatal frost. What was Hawthorne's worry? The replacement of the open fireplace by the iron stove.”

Anne Trager (02:27)
It could have been TikTok.

Fabrice Neuman (02:31)
Yeah, exactly. So let me remind everybody of the date 1843, right? So almost like 200 years ago. And it's amazing to see that basically we are having the same conversations over and over again.

Of all the things I thought about, it made me think of a conversation I had with a friend a few years ago about the use of GPS. I know, basically, I think it's safe to say that we all use GPS today to go from one place to the next because we don't know where it is exactly. And the discussion is because of GPS, we don't know where places are anymore because we trust the GPS to take us there, right?

But what I liked in this conversation is that it became another question, which was what is the best way to get lost? Yeah, because exactly, because so what he said was he didn't like to use GPS because then the GPS would lead him to where he wanted to go.

Anne Trager (03:30)
I like that, switching it around.

Fabrice Neuman (03:45)
Eventually without being without taking any side roads or wherever so he would say but then because of that we don't get lost anymore and I don't like that

Anne Trager (03:55)
I can so relate to that. I remember when I first arrived in Paris in the mid-1980s, one of my favorite activities was getting lost. I mean, just going and walking and getting lost in the city. I totally get it. I have nostalgia for that.

Fabrice Neuman (04:13)
Yeah. Well, I see what you mean. But then to me, having a GPS is the safest way to get lost because then you can choose to deactivate it. You know, you turn it off, you get lost, but then you know that wherever you are, you can get back. And that's the thing. And that's the discussion. And we we hit a wall in that discussion because he couldn't grasp that idea. For him, it didn't make any sense. And what he was saying didn't make any sense to me. And so which is why I thought it would illustrate exactly what this discussion is all about. The use of technology of something new that comes up and how we make it our own.

Anne Trager (05:00)
Exactly, exactly. And you're right. And this discussion is not new. Let's go back. Again, this is from The New Yorker article. And I really invite everybody to go and actually read that article. It goes back to Plato's Phaedrus in which Socrates argues that writing will wreck people's memories. So it started way back then. And of course, when books came to be, books were a problem.

Fabrice Neuman (05:08)
Yeah.

Anne Trager (05:28)
They were kept from the populace for a very long time because of the big problem that they would cause. And then novels were even worse. Thomas Jefferson, a founding father of the United States, once said that he warned readers they would fall under the spell of novels, which he called this mass of trash.

They would lose patience for wholesome reading. Same thing. It's the same thing that you were mentioning about the iron stove or that we hear about some of the tools that we have now. He went on, Thomas Jefferson, to say that readers would suffer from “bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust towards the real business of life.” So I just think that's a circle. It's the same words.

Fabrice Neuman (05:55)
It's incredible.

Anne Trager (06:23)
We heard the same thing about television. So this article mentions a book by Chris Hayes called The Siren's Call, where he goes through a long history of this kind of panic around new technology. And some of the panics were more prophetic than others, were more realistic than others. But what he brings to light is this tendency we have to get all bent out of shape as to what's going to happen to us whenever something new comes up.

So I asked myself, what is AI really doing to us? Personally, I can say after using AI for, what, a year and a half, maybe two now, generative AI specifically, that sometimes it makes me feel a little lazier. Instead of sitting there and contemplating what kinds of wonderful ideas could just bubble up, I just jump in and start interacting with the AI in order to encourage myself. So I don't know if it's lazy or impatient, but I want to get to something meaty sooner. So that's one of the things I've noticed in myself.

Fabrice Neuman (07:29)
Yeah. You could argue that any new tech at least has the goal to help us and be more either productive or make us work a little bit less. I mean, you can say that for the fridge, for example, you know, it's making our life easier.

Anne Trager (07:46)
Exactly. Exactly, exactly. So I'm just noticing that this in the way I'm doing things. There's no judgment in it actually. I'm just noticing that my behavior is changing a little bit around the way I sit down and think about ideas.

So that's just a one-on-one experience, my experience, but what does the science say? The science is not conclusive right now. There are people who talk about something called digital dementia, which is a very scary name, and there are some studies that show that with large-scale use of digital devices and so forth, there is a shrinking of the gray matter, which has an impact on memory and emotional regulation. Obviously, it's not just any kind. I mean, you have to look at the details to figure out how much and what devices and in what way that actually have that impact, but they exist. There are studies that show that our phones seem to have this magnetic way of attracting our brains to them, whether they are on or off.

We've talked about it before. If you want to get something done, hide your phone. Otherwise your brain is just going to be thinking about it. There's something that's called the Google effect, which is how we forget things due to reliance on tech. This is related to your GPS story. We actually forget how to find our way because we rely on tech. OK?

Fabrice Neuman (09:13)
Mm-hmm.

I would add to that, we started way back when with our phones, when we were able to put our contact numbers into the SIM cards, right? And so we started to forget numbers. I do remember vividly discussions about, but we don't remember phone numbers anymore. And who wants to do that today? I'm not one of them.

Anne Trager (09:39)
Exactly. Exactly. I mean, when was the last time we remembered a phone number?

Fabrice Neuman (09:47)
Exactly.

Anne Trager (09:48)
So there's also science that does show a deficit in attention when we are multitasking.

That's the science. There's sort of popular trend that internet is chipping away at our capacity for concentration and contemplation. There are a lot of books out about it, about our distractibility, fragmented consciousness and the other doomsday effects of distraction. So I think that a lot of the question today seems to be about this whole distraction thing and not so much specifically about our use of AI, but more about our inability to concentrate. And we've talked about that before. We went through a whole thing about focus in episode 11, which echoes what we're saying here — this is not a new question. Our ability to focus. I mean, maybe we're not made to focus. Maybe we are just really beautiful distraction machines.

And that in order to focus, we need to have a deliberate practice of focusing. We need to decide to focus on something and to build up that skill. So that's one thing. And the other thing is that I'm not exactly sure we're not able to focus anymore. I mean, I'm not convinced by that. If the content is successful at grabbing us in, well, we can focus. A whole bunch of movies are getting longer and longer. They're four-hour movies. I mean, and they seem to keep you focused if the content is good.

You know, we also focus a really long time on social media. Why? Because it is pushing all the right bells and whistles or buttons or whatever. That's a totally mixed metaphor—pushing all the right buttons and blowing all the right whistles so that we become like Pavlov and his dog, more like the dog than like Pavlov, social media being Pavlov.

Fabrice Neuman (11:22)
Hmm.
Let's say buttons and whistles, okay.

He he he.

Anne Trager (11:46)
So are we really losing our ability to focus or are we just focusing on different things? And that brings me to this whole idea of what is called attention capitalism, which are these tools, the Pavlov's that are getting out there and ringing the bell at the right moment so that we keep going back. And there's a concept. And we keep going back to this notion of attention and attention capitalists will grab our attention with all of these techniques just like novelists do. They grab our attention and we sit down and we read for a very long time a very good story, if it's a very good story. And if we don't, well there is the number one law, that right that every reader has to put the book down. Which brings us to what we can do with our devices again and our AI and all of our tech is to put the book down or to put it down. So it's not so much that we can't focus, it's that we need to remember to choose what we are focusing on. And all of this tech, all of this AI, they're tools like anything else. And we have to choose whether or not we focus on.

Fabrice Neuman (12:46)
Yeah.

Anne Trager (13:03)
These tools that are like slot machines or we do something else.

Fabrice Neuman (13:08)
Yeah, so it makes me think of something else from this article from The New Yorker, which basically talks about the fact that it seems that a lot of these discussions come from the fact that the people who are talking about the lack of focus and attention are the ones who are basically scared that we are not focusing on the same things as we were before, like on books, but we focus on TikTok.

And so they don't like that. So for them, it's something to fear, but maybe it's just the way of our evolution. I don't know. To me, it also relates to procrastination. Knowing that I have many things available to me makes it harder for me to tick off things on my to-do list, for example, because, you know, I find myself more often than not I look at the list of things I have to do and I start something else. And it's weird because it's a real struggle because it gives me this feeling of non-accomplishment and my to-do list is getting longer and so it's a stress actually.

Anne Trager (14:24)
I would recommend that you actually go see a coach about this because I spend a lot of time helping people get focused on what they want to do and overcome procrastination. This is what we do. It is hard because as I said we are distraction machines and we have a capacity for focus when we choose to focus and we can focus on anything and we're constantly having to make that choice. What am I going to focus on?

Fabrice Neuman (14:36)
Absolutely.

Anne Trager (14:53)
There are practices that make it easier to focus on what you need to do. One of my favorite practices and the actual hardest practice that I have ever come across is to do nothing. I mean, absolutely do nothing, to practice doing nothing, staring at a blank wall. And it doesn't take very long staring at a blank wall, for me at least, to want to get back to doing something that I have to do. As long as I make the rule that I go back to doing what I have to do and not something else that is a distraction.

Fabrice Neuman (15:21)
Hmph. Yeah. Well, it begs the question. wonder, I don't think we have the data for that, whether it's harder for us today to try and do nothing than it for people 100 years ago.

Anne Trager (15:40)
I believe it's Blaise Pascal, and you'll know the dates better than I would on that French philosopher, who talked about the difficulty of sitting in a room alone with your thoughts for 15 minutes. So again, not new, not new.

Fabrice Neuman (15:52)
Hmm. Again, not new. So we, we mentioned TikTok already and the hard thing that you were describing of doing nothing. And so do you think that endlessly scrolling TikTok feeds is equivalent to doing nothing?

You know, because TikTok is all the rage today. You know, people are, it's a prime target, if you will, you because it's, once again, I think part of this is the fright. know, people are scared of TikTok because it seems that it's able, thanks to AI basically, to make sure that when you start watching a video, you don't just watch only one and you keep on going and you scroll and you watch a video and then two and then 10 and then 100 and then three hours passed. know, and linked to that, there's another article, we'll put the show notes as well from the Financial Times that TikTok erodes youth cognition.

The study Warns, you know, that's the title. To link to what you were saying before this is what also journalists have been doing for since the beginning of journalism, finding titles to try and bring you in and keep you there, right? Which is the same thing, right? But nobody would say that an article from Financial Times would erode your cognition today.

But maybe a years ago it would. Once again, I know, so, and basically the article says the new study links TikTok's endless scroll to declining math and literacy skills with 15 year olds showing a sharp drop in focus since the mid 2010s, sorry, raising fears of a brain rot, quote unquote, epidemic. As AI races ahead, experts question if visual media is dumbing down the next generation.

Anne Trager (18:02)
When I look at those numbers from that Financial Times article, it is kind of scary for those of us who learn to count and learn to read because there is a huge drop in numeracy and literacy in adults.

Fabrice Neuman (18:12)
Hehe

Anne Trager (18:19)
And a significant drop in science and reading and math skills in teenagers. So it is scary because it is such a huge change. So I wonder what these adults and these teenagers are doing with all that brain power they have. And I'm actually quite excited about that to figure it out. And...

Maybe it is brain rot. I don't know. Again, if we get back to it, first of all, what I would like to say is that TikTok is not like doing nothing because TikTok uses all of these techniques that will engage your whole dopamine system so that you just feel a rush and you can't put it down. This is part of it. Whereas doing nothing and staring at a wall is just boring. There is no dopamine going on there at all. And it will reset your dopamine system, which is why it makes it easier then to go back and do the hard stuff you have to do because it's so boring. If I simplify that whole explanation. And I wanted to get back to AI because all of this research is a little mixed up between internet and TikTok. So our question for today is, is AI making us stupid? So there is a little bit of research about this. There was a Swiss study done on 666 participants that says AI use and associated cognitive offloading, that's what we were talking about, not doing the things because the tech will do it for you reduces critical thinking. It's pretty clear it reduces critical thinking. So there was another study by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon. However, it's a self-reported study. It's on half the number of people. So we're not talking big numbers here.

Fabrice Neuman (20:01)
Hmm.

Anne Trager (20:17)
And this study found that the more users trusted AI-generated outputs, the less cognitive effort they applied, leading to what the writers of this study refer to as the automation paradox. So again, it's this whole thing of offloading your cognitive tasks to AI, and it makes us worse at performing those tasks independently.

I don't know if worse is the right word. I would say it makes us less likely to perform them independently because ultimately, not only are we distraction machines, we're also kind of lazy and we like to expend the least amount of energy possible. And this leads to something which I think we all could benefit from being aware of, which is called automation complacency. So what happens is the more you automate for example, the use of AI to help you in decision making, the more we rely on it, the more we trust it and the less we actually use it to make decisions. mean, yes, we actually use our brains, sorry, to make decisions. So we rely on it more and more and we think about what we're doing less and less, something to be aware of. So that's what I found that would support the idea that AI is making us stupid.

There is research out there that says that it's not making us stupid. We know that it can enhance memory among people if you use it to optimize your learning schedules, for example. You can use it to allow you to focus on critical aspects of different tasks.

You can use it, again, as a tool to improve any academic performance in significant ways. You can use it in all different kinds of ways to improve the way we think. So again, as far as the research is concerned, using AI and generative AI specifically getting mixed results overall and it's really context dependent.

What this leads me to believe is that the use of the good use of AI is like a contact sport. You get in and you wrestle with it and you use it and you actively engage in it. And this will lead to better outcomes. So you have to use your judgment and that way, I mean, you really have to use your judgment and you have to get involved and use it to help you think better. Be intentional.

Fabrice Neuman (22:52)
So it seems that basically you're asking people to fight their laziness, whichever tool we have. I know, like when we have a car, then we don't walk. You know, it reminds me of the, my definition of a car is a tool we use 15 minutes to avoid walking five. And I think it applies to AI. You know, we have this discussion of can AI write something for me in my voice? But in order for the AI to do that, you need to teach the AI a lot to get to a result that's questionable. And so you have to put the time in it. So, is this, do you want to put the time to do that? Or do you want to write the article yourself, basically?

Sometimes I feel like a broken record because it's like for me AI as everything else has to be considered as a tool to help us think and not replace our thinking. I think it's what makes it easier is that we all have these discussions about how AI can hallucinate so much, how the results given by generative AI search tools are not that good. And for example, we used Gen ai to get ready for this podcast to prepare a bit asking it, you know, are there any studies and what can we think about this question of AI making us stupid or not? the tools we used are were pretty good, but we had to go deep and sometimes, for example, chat GPT gave me some links that didn't work. And so these discussions, after two years of chat GPT, this chat GPT era, it seems that everybody now knows that these tools can hallucinate. And to me, this is giving us this push to more critical thinking because we know these tools are not perfect, right?

And so just like at the beginning of the Google era, Google search engine era, it was so incredibly good. So we could like search for something and then we would click on the first link and then that would have been it, right? And then today, and it's been a few years, we basically, quote unquote, all have this discussion about the fact that the results given by Google are not as good as they were before.

I'm not sure about that. Maybe they are. But on top of that, we actually now notice that maybe they were not that perfect before, anyhow. And so we discuss the results. We go further. We ask another search engine. When we use AI tools for web we want to go further. And we don't take that just for face value.

That brings me to the phrase I like in order to, instead of calling AI artificial intelligence, I like to call it augmented intelligence because then when doing so, we put back the intelligence into our brains, which can be augmented by tools. it reminds me of this quote by Steve Jobs describing the computer as being the bicycle for the mind because thanks to this tool then the human was much more efficient in going from one place to the next using the less amount of energy to go there compared to any other species. And maybe AI as augmented intelligence is the e-bike version of that.

Anne Trager (26:39)
Mm-hmm. Nice, nice, Well, and I like that and I want to circle back to what you said about me asking people to fight the lazy part of their brain because you're doing exactly the same. If it's augmented intelligence then actually the intelligence in there is my own and I have to use it. So the choice then is to choose when you want to be lazy and when you don't want to be lazy and to be very aware of that because of course we need time also just rest our beautiful minds.

This discussion reminds me of another article I read recently in the magazine The New Scientist, the March 22 issue, which quoted a journal article from Science Magazine where a team of AI researchers said that these tools “should not be viewed primarily as intelligent agents, but as a new kind of cultural and social technology, allowing humans to take advantage of information other humans have accumulated.” And I found that to be a really fabulous definition of how we can use it. And that AI is currently transforming the way we access and process information like technologies have done previously.

Fabrice Neuman (28:17)
Yes.

Anne Trager (28:18)
And it allows me to circle back, as I always do, I am a broken record too, that we need to choose what we pay attention to and how we use these tools. Where are we focusing our attention? And I would like to end on this idea that, first of all, we can choose where to focus our attention and bring information from the World Economic Forum's 2025 Future of Jobs report, which tells us exactly where we need to be focusing our attention if we want to be useful in the current and future job market. And that's analytical thinking. So we do need to focus on doing that. We need to use, we need to do it. As well as resilience and flexibility and creative thinking and agility and leadership and social influence. These are things that people do well, that won't be replaced by AI right away. So that's where we should focus our attention.

Fabrice Neuman (29:19)
Well, that's food for thought and that will be all for our episode 14. Thank you all for joining us and visit humanpulsepodcast.com for links and past episodes.

Anne Trager (29:29)
Thank you also for subscribing and reviewing wherever it is that you listen to your podcasts. It really helps other people to find us. And please share this with one person around you who may or may not be using AI. See you in two weeks.

Fabrice Neuman (29:48)
Bye everyone.