The People Who Will Thrive in the AI Age

AI also seems to shift workers’ expectations, and their boss’s expectations, about how much they should accomplish in a day.
The ActivTrak researchers found that the time people spent on focused, uninterrupted work fell by 9 percent. There’s even a name for this mental state: “AI brain fry.”
Every time some new labor-saving technology is introduced, there are experts (the ones who know a lot about technology but not much about psychology) who predict that people will use the technology to make life easier. Soon we’ll all be enjoying 15-hour workweeks! Instead, many people use the technology to make their life more frenetic and full.
In other words, what will differentiate people is not how smart they are but their relationship to mental effort.
These are the people who enjoy playing difficult games and reading dense books. On the other end of the spectrum, there are the cognitive misers, the people who find it unpleasant to think hard and take any opportunity not to do it. In the middle are the people who have a medium need for cognition. They will put in the effort when they really care about something, but they don’t intrinsically enjoy it.
GPS merely shrivels some navigation skills; AI threatens to shrivel everything within those who let it.
People with a cultivation mindset seek friction; people with an optimization mindset want their life to be frictionless.
If you’re going for optimization, you’re looking to maximize output, not excellence. In a survey conducted for the software firm GoTo, 43 percent of workers said they had submitted AI-generated content even though they suspected that it contained errors and was generally of low quality.
A research team led by Suqing Wu of Zhejiang University and Yukun Liu of ShanghaiTech found that when they let people use AI and then asked them to do another task unaided by AI, the participants’ intrinsic motivation levels dropped by an average of 11 percent, and their sense of boredom increased by 20 percent. Engaging with AI made the first task seem more enjoyable, rendering ordinary work dull by comparison.
The technology is asking you to be a competent conversation partner with a highly intelligent but imperfect entity. But what if you’ve never done the work to form your own worldview or build your own knowledge base? You’re going to engage in what the experts call “cognitive surrender.” You’re going to believe everything the bot tells you, head off in whatever direction the bot suggests.
If you thought that economic inequality or political polarization were bad, cognitive polarization will be truly terrible, dividing society into what might begin to look like two different species. The high-need-for-cognition people will get more and more productive, happier and happier; the rest will fall into a kind of mental underclass.
When we are surrounded by machines that know a lot about a lot of subjects, what really distinguishes people is their desire to work hard and put knowledge to creative effect. What really matters, therefore, is not brainpower but the willingness to run the mental marathons that produce high-quality results.
How do we train people to see their life as a hero’s journey in which they take on difficult missions that they may fail at and that will certainly involve pain and suffering? How do we form people so they have an explorer’s heart, a willingness to endure, an ability to struggle on, even when their body and mind are telling them to give up, to reach new destinations and figure stuff out?
The most straightforward theory of motivation is known as self-determination theory, founded by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan. People feel motivated when they are put in situations that give them autonomy (I’m in control of my choices), competence (I’m developing my skills), and relatedness (people here care about me).
If we can help people learn to want more, hunger more, they’ll be willing to undertake the mental effort to do hard things, and we’ll avoid the cognitive polarization that is staring us in the face.