How to Balance New AI Tools with Your Own Knowledge and Expertise?
People running in a marathon.
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AI is not reducing our workload, but to thrive without becoming overwhelmed, you should strive to be a "mental marathoner"—someone who uses AI to enhance their own critical thinking rather than replace it.
In my ongoing quest to learn to navigate AI without turning my brain to mush, I read a recent article by David Brooks titled “The people who will thrive in the AI age”. In it, he presents one study from the research firm ActivTrak, which found that people who adopted AI became more productive (and potentially frazzled). Another study from Berkeley found that workers using AI took back a lot of work that was once outsourced because the activities and coding for it became easier. They also worked in short bursts during non-work hours and engaged in more multitasking.
If you have been reading this blog for a while, you will know that “frazzled” and more multitasking is not what I am aiming to accomplish. However, this data does suggest that AI is not reducing the amount of work we do.
Becoming a “Mental Marathoner”
Brooks goes on to suggest that people’s success in an AI-powered world might be a function of their relationship to mental effort rather than how they use it to do more or less work. He then posits three types of people: the productive passenger, the reluctant optimizer, and the mental marathoner. Look at the full article for a complete description of the first two types, but I was particularly interested in the idea of the mental marathoner.
According to Brooks, the mental marathoner is the kind of person who has a lot of “task-related” thoughts, enjoys stimulating conversation, and has a high need for control and closure. They also tend to have a harder time being convinced to change their minds once they are made up, but we can’t have everything. Mental marathons want to create original work and will put in the effort to increase their agency in that process.
This sounds like the kind of person I want to try and be. How about you?
Establishing Your Own AI Policy
So how do we do this? Well, Brooks provided a few ideas that I have reworked into what you see below:
1. Ask AI and bots for hints, not answers – Ask for background thinking or clarification that will advance your own thinking. Think of AI as a personal trainer for your brain. It helps you do the best mental reps; it shouldn’t do them for you.
2. Start with a blank page – Write out your own thinking before turning to AI to critique and challenge where you started. Think of this like crowdsourcing your work in real time, with the most connected crowd you can imagine.
3. Rotate tasks – For every one AI task you complete, follow it with a non-AI task. This keeps your mind sharp and capable of doing the mental lifting.
Ask for thinkers, not thinking
AI is an incredible tool that can access and synthesize unfathomable volumes of data in the blink of an eye. While it can become the mental equivalent of a wet blanket, dampening your capacity to think clearly and creatively, why not let it be mental rocket fuel? Use AI to hone your own thinking, interpretation, writing, and creative work. These tips for creating your own AI policy will help preserve your deep human critique and content knowledge.
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