Massive use of A.I. will gradually kill the mental exercises from which humans develop all manner of critical thinking.
“Massive use of A.I. will gradually kill the mental exercises from which humans develop all manner of critical thinking”
No way out of that reality.
Perhaps.
For an area of environmental history in which I am considered an authoritative expert, AI such as ChatGPT is woefully ignorant. It pulls answers from poorly sourced documents and cannot provide documentation from primary sources.
No doubt it will improve. But currently it is acting as a web scraper and little else.
That presumes that people decide to stop thinking.
A person using a calculator still has to understand precisely what he wants the calculator to do. The calculator is like a tractor to a farmer. The farmer still has to understand exactly what has to be done—what seeds to plant, what fertilizer to use, how much water is required.
The tool removes tedium. It provides leverage.
When a person uses AI to produce code, precise instructions are still required and the code has to be debugged and tested carefully. That's leverage, not the removal of critical thinking.
BTW, people who use computers for mathematical modeling, or engineering, or accounting, or statistics are not mentally lazier than people who don't use computers. They are always significantly more intellectually robust. Computers requires more rigor, not less.