AI and the Desire to Think

The coming cognitive divide

Yesterday I published a long essay asking whether a serious writer can use AI without losing his soul. My answer was yes, but only if AI assists the work instead of becoming the source of the work.

Today, almost as if the internet wanted to provide an immediate footnote, I came across a new David Brooks piece in The Atlantic that intersects with the same question, but from a broader cultural angle. The title is “The People Who Will Thrive in the AI Age” (paywalled), and the subtitle states the thesis directly: “What will differentiate people is not how smart they are but their relationship to mental effort.”

That seems exactly right to me. And also, as it happens, quietly horrifying.

Brooks’s concern is that AI may not simply make some people more productive while leaving others behind in the ordinary economic sense. It may intensify a deeper divide between those who use AI to think more and those who use it to think less, a divide rooted not just in intelligence but people’s appetite for mental effort, difficulty, and sustained attention. He points out that psychologists refer to the “high need for cognition” that some people possess. Such people “enjoy thinking hard. These are the people who enjoy playing difficult games and reading dense books.” Contrasting with these, there are also “the cognitive misers, the people who find it unpleasant to think hard and take any opportunity not to do it.” And of course many people fall somewhere on the spectrum between these poles. This variable quality, says Brooks, will be one of the defining factors in how we individually and collectively relate to artificial intelligence, leading to a societal condition of “extreme cognitive polarization.”

I think this is where the issue becomes more than just technological, entering the realms of the anthropological and even the spiritual. The question is whether we will still want to undergo the effort by which our own minds become more awake and articulate, more capable of desire, judgment, and inward life. For those who are attuned to such things, there’s a kind of Philip K. Dick feeling here, or maybe a cyberpunk undertone: the possibility of a society divided not only by wealth, status, or political allegiance, but by the degree to which people still cultivate the inward powers that make them fully human, based on our individual relationships with a super-technology that interfaces with our very minds.

This resonates strongly with what I was trying to say in yesterday’s essay. The danger for writers is not simply that AI can produce bad writing, or fake writing, or “slop,” but that it can tempt us to bypass the very act by which writing forms us. We sometimes mistake writing for mere textual output, when it’s actually one of the ways thought happens. It’s one of the ways inwardness becomes articulate, one of the ways the soul discovers what it knows.

Brooks makes a related point when he argues that AI may ultimately reveal what’s most human by disclosing what AI cannot do. If machines can calculate, synthesize, summarize, and generate at extraordinary speed, then the human role may be more clearly revealed as desire, love, purpose, judgment, and choosing what matters. This is both an appealing thought and a demanding one, because it means our task isn’t simply to learn how to use AI, but to become the kind of people who will still know what is worth using it for.

That, I think, is the live wire. Some people will use AI to sharpen their attention, and deepen their thinking, and aid them in discovering patterns, and return with renewed vigor to their own reflection and creativity. Others will use it to escape these things altogether. The same tool may either strengthen or weaken the person using it, depending on its relationship—and, crucially, their own relationship—to effort, attention, and inward desire, to the wellspring of their felt identity.

So maybe the question I asked about writers has a broader form: Can a human being use AI without losing the desire to think?

Or more pointedly: After using AI, do you feel more awake to your own mind, or less?

(If you haven’t read yesterday’s essay: “Can a Serious Writer Use AI Without Losing His Soul?”)

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P.S. You may have noticed there’s no image accompanying this post. That’s intentional. I recently realized I’ve grown weary of searching for an appropriate visual to accompany everything I publish here. It’s something I’ve done for two decades now, ever since I launched my original blog, The Teeming Brain, back in 2006. My wheelhouse is writing, not images, and after nearly two decades of playing the “find the right blog image” game, I’m inclined to let the words stand on their own. Maybe I’ll keep doing this. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll even go back and remove all the images from previous posts to create a uniform look. Or maybe not. For now, it feels freeing to let the words just speak for themselves.

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The inner work of the creative life:

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