AI usage has reached the tipping point. According to a recent PEW study, half of U.S. adults use an AI Chatbot regularly. Since the rollout of ChatGPT in late 2022, adoption of AI has exploded at a rate not previously seen, outpacing adoption of both the Internet in the late 20th century and Smartphones between 2010 to 2015.
The survey is looking just at the deliberate use of AI through an agent like ChatGPT, Claude or Google’s Gemini. It doesn’t include the AI that is now baked into everything we do in our virtual world. But today I want to explore how our own personal feelings about AI evolve over that adoption cycle, and that requires us to know that we are using AI.
As I mentioned a while back, I am one of those 50% who have been tentatively adopting AI. As a self-professed geek and early adopter, I love to kick the tires of new tech. I’ve always been like that. I was one of the first in my city in British Columbia to drag myself online when the siren call of a dial up modem beckoned back in the mid 90s.
But AI adoption feels different to me. I have never had such mixed feelings about a new technology. I have adopted – in turn – computers (late 1970s and early 1980s), the Internet (mid 1990s) and smartphones (around 2008 or 2009, thanks to a delayed iPhone roll out in Canada). With each of those, I was a kid in a brand-new candy store. I rushed to embrace the future with wide-eyed wonder, focused exclusively on the “gee-whiz” possibilities that lay ahead.
This time is different. Maybe it’s the “once burned – twice shy” knowledge picked up over my life where I’ve learned that new technologies always have a dark side (I’m talking about you, social media).
Or maybe it’s the intensely personal nature of AI itself. As a dilettante in the realms of neuroscience and psychology, I am keenly aware of the downsides of any technology that creeps into the fundamental ways we humans think and act. It’s quickly appearing that AI doesn’t just creep. It kicks our cognitive door down.
So I, like many of you I suspect, have been trying to figure out what part deliberate use of AI will play in my life. And I have found that it’s a process. At first, the “gee whiz” part of me was amazed at what AI could do. But lately, I have been trying to reconcile that with the growing feeling that by embracing what AI could do, I was surrendering what I could do.
We have now reached the point where we can’t ignore AI. It can, and does, allow us to do things we couldn’t do without it. AI will run our world. If we want to be a participating part of that world, we’d better figure out how, when and what we will use AI for.
As I’ve progressed past simply being – in equal parts – amazed and terrified at what AI can do, I have found that for me, it comes down to a balance of risk and reward. I tend to use AI as an information gatherer, especially in areas where my domain knowledge may be limited. In that, I use AI as search on steroids, sending it to gather the information I need to make informed decisions. The risk is high and the potential reward is low. These tasks are typically drudge work and if you miss something, it can have serious consequences.
But where I find AI more threatening is in areas where I am intrinsically rewarded for doing something. Creative pursuits, for example. I, like many people, have used AI to produce pictures or even create songs. And while the results were genuinely astonishing, I felt like I was cheating somehow. Yes, the output was impressive, but my contribution was simply writing in a few prompts and doing some fine-tuning. There was little of “me” in the finished product.
The same is proving true in another personally rewarding realm – travel. There is a new backlash against trips that have been overly optimized by AI. Vykintas Maknickas, CEO of the travel eSIM app Saily, recently said of AI planned trips, “We’re not losing directions, we’re losing permission to be lost. That used to be a core part of travel. You would miss a turn, ask someone for help, end up in a conversation and sometimes even in the wrong place, and that is often where the stories came from.”
But it’s not just travel where ruthlessly efficient AI is stripping away the joy that comes from being imperfectly human. Just like when we’re wandering through Rome on vacation, we humans seldom travel in straight lines. To be human is to experiment, to err, to adjust and – on that journey – to learn. Educational philosopher Gert Biesta would love to see education slow down and become more serendipitous. In a recent essay, he explained, “It’s being confronted with your own freedom, when you need to figure out: What do you do if no one tells you what to do?
“The faster [the students] go,” Biesta said, “the fewer the opportunities for hesitation, judgment, or uncertainty.”
That’s the danger, but like many new technologies, once AI becomes a habit, it’s a notoriously hard one to break. Biesta warns us, “AI is a highly addictive technology. It easily sucks you in and then makes you forget yourself.”
Ultimately, each of us will have to make our own peace with our use of AI. And, like most things that are human, that will play out along a bell curve. Some of us will use AI for everything. Some of us will try to avoid it as much as possible. Most of us will be somewhere in the middle.
For me, I will be somewhere in that middle. I’m just not sure where that will be yet.
