"The People Who Will Thrive in the AI Age"

I'm still thinking about thinking about thinking. I'm still working on the adult version of the books I created with the help of chatGPT for 5-7 year olds and for adolescents. AI is an unruly beast, and just telling it to write something, even in a detailed prompt, is a formula for slop. It is taking me 3 hours per page because I need to continually redirect the copy and the art direction. Given the context I fed it about cognitive hygiene and research about the atrophying effects of and immunization against cognitive offloading, chatGPT does an excellent job of reducing that knowledge to the kind of terse labels required in a comix format. But it tends to skate into local minima, straying, for example, from advice about maintaining independent thinking while using AI into perfectly useful but tangential advice about using AI wisely. Likewise, it will try to sneak in previous poses, backgrounds, and layouts. It won't innovate imagery and layouts imaginatively unless instructed to (and then it sometimes does a spectacularly good job and sometimes tries to pass off a Hallmark card).

All of which leads to this recent article by David Brooks. I wasn't particularly enthralled by the article, but want to add this advice to my growing body of cognitive hygiene lore:

Ask for hints, not answers: People who ask AI to directly answer their questions suffer severe declines in motivation and ability. But people who ask AI for background thinking or clarifications do not.

Start with a blank page: Before you go to the bot, start with a blank piece of paper and write up your own analysis and conclusions. Then ask AI to challenge your thinking, not produce it.

Rotate tasks: Every time you do a task with AI, follow it with a task that doesn’t involve AI. That will keep your creative-effort muscles alive.

Redesign the bots: General chatbot use undermines learning. But as the writer Alberto Romero notes, AI tutors actually improve learning and motivation. That’s because although chatbots mostly answer questions, tutors lead students on structured learning journeys. It should be possible to redesign the normal bots so that they function less like encyclopedias and more like personal trainers whose jobs are designed to build mental muscles, rather than replace them.

Make a sharp distinction between rote work and creative work: Let AI write functional emails. Don’t let it write your essays or your memos. Shame people who do.

Ask for thinkers, not thinking: My favorite trick when using Claude is to never ask it to think through a problem for me. I ask it to summarize the thinkers who have already addressed a given problem. If I’m trying to understand child development, I ask it to imagine a debate between Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson. What would these two great psychologists say to each other about the problem I’m wrestling with? Then I ask it what books by these thinkers I should read if I want to understand their work. I get much better