Critical thinking and AI tools

In today’s AI age, the state of human critical thinking is undergoing more critical evaluation than ever before.

Recently, I’ve been hearing people say that they actively avoid trying to use AI to prevent their brain from becoming “mush” as they feel that using AI is reducing their critical thinking skills. This idea has been quite interesting to ponder about as I doubt I have lost any capability to think critically as a result of using AI ("— a classic symptom of AI brain-rot"). In fact, I believe AI is helping me learn and implement new technologies and concepts faster in many novel ways that wouldn’t be possible with the conventional approach of researching relevant knowledge sources and consulting subject matter experts. This “bootstrap knowledge search” approach comes with its own unique set of problems as it’s entirely possible to research the wrong concepts in your quest to solve the problem and sometimes the experts aren’t able (or willing) to give you the support or answers you are looking for.

The majority of my education occurred in the pre-AI era where I studied (suffered) many engineering problems without an AI assistant at my fingertips and spent many fruitless hours in the library and computer lab staring blankly at concepts, which was actual advice given to me by a professor (“Stare at it, it’ll start to make sense soon enough.”) Thus, I balk at the draconian dogma that the best way for people to learn is to endure mental hardship in the hopes of finding intellectual enlightenment, and that if people aren’t successful at this, that they aren’t thinking hard enough or are being lazy.

I believe we are thinking critically whenever we use AI to understand, solve, and quickly explain complex problems or tasks. I’m also firm believer that there are no perfect learning or problem-solving tools, AI or not, and as long as we ground our understanding in that fact, we will not lose our capacities to reason effectively.