Sinéad Bovell: The Hidden Cost of AI Productivity and How to Protect Your Critical Thinking | Artificial Intelligence | E418

Hala Taha (0:00)

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Last month, I was interviewing Jim Quick and nothing was working. None of my AIs would let me upload anything. And then suddenly, I felt like I was completely handicapped and I can't do this interview.

Sinéad Bovell (2:09)

That's the scary part, right? When you catch yourself in a moment where you feel like, oh, I can't make a decision or do the task without this technology. But we don't think, what is the second order impact of that trade-off? Sometimes when I'm reading something from AI, I'm in this like cognitive haze. I read something and it's not necessarily clicking. So I always say that AI has to be an input into your decision-making and it can't be the decision.

Hala Taha (2:35)

My guest is Sinéad Bovell, a futurist and tech entrepreneur who studies how AI is changing the way we work, learn, and live. We're talking with our AI all the time and AI is giving us information about the world. What kind of a reality will that end up being?

Sinéad Bovell (2:51)

I call this the post-reality era, a world where I just ask my AI, tell me about the latest geopolitical crisis in X, or tell me is the economy going well?

AI generates that answer and that reality for me. Reality becomes something that is AI generated and I decide if it's real or not.

Hala Taha (3:08)

What is the most dystopian feature that you could imagine?

Sinéad Bovell (3:12)

Oh, goodness. The worst-case scenario with AI.

Hala Taha (3:16)

Sinéad, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast.

Sinéad Bovell (3:18)

Thanks for having me.

Hala Taha (3:20)

I am really looking forward to this conversation because you've got such an awesome perspective on AI and you talk about a lot of things that people aren't really talking about right now. So the conversation is, how does AI make me smarter, make me faster? We're outsourcing our reading, our writing, and everybody's asking the question of, how can AI enhance my productivity? How can AI make me smarter? But nobody is asking, is this actually going to hurt the way that I think?

So my first question to you is, what do you think we're not asking in terms of AI, in terms of how we think cognitively?

Sinéad Bovell (4:01)

We tend to think about things quite linearly.

So now I have this technology that can allow me to operate much faster, it can allow me to be much more productive. But we don't think, what is the second order impact of that trade-off? So I'm obviously bullish on AI, I think it's a technology that's here to stay. But you have to think about the whole ecosystem. So if AI is making you a bit more productive, what are you replacing with that time? If that is nothing that stimulated your brain in a similar way, or allowed you to nourish the cognitive capacities that you expect to have, attention, memory, judgment, making decisions on your own, then you're making a pretty risky bet by giving everything that you used for your critical thinking to this technology. So it's about figuring out that optimal balance, and I don't think we do because we're in such a productivity-centric society, and that's all we think about. That's also how AI is marketed and pitched a lot. This is going to drive productivity, drive productivity, but we have to think about the entire system we operate in.