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This is a monthly free article. I tend to use free articles to write about things I care about the most and I want everyone to read, and this is one of those.
So, there has been some time, a few months ago, when this picture was pretty much everywhere on my feed 👇
It is, apparently, Rio de Janeiro in the seventies. Of course it may be not—I don’t need to explain how internet works—but details don’t matter too much here.
What many people notice about this photo is that everyone seems to be in good shape. And I guess, especially for US folks (allow me this small stab, as an Italian), this is in stark contrast to how people at the beach look today.
Now, this is from a time in which going to the gym was less of a thing, we knew a lot less about nutrition, and we can imagine people generally thought less about what makes for good health, compared to today. Yet, folks somewhat naturally ended up in a healthy lifestyle.
Compare it to today, where being in good shape is obviously still possible, but it feels more like the result of intentional effort and practices that often go against what our natural lifestyle would lead us to.
In other words: it’s hard!
Now, even if you don’t 100% agree with this premise, it is useful to think — and it must be true in some cases — that changes in society (or technology) bring new problems, some of which challenge parts of our lives that, before that, we didn’t have to think a lot about.
To some extent, I worry that AI is going to do just that for our cognitive skills.
That is, it is not going to necessarily make us dumber — but it will require us to develop good practices for our cognitive health, similarly to what we eventually developed for our bodies.
At this point, the obvious question becomes: what are these practices going to look like?
I don’t feel we are ready for a full framework here, so I will just speak about my experience with AI in recent months 👇
🤖 Luca & AI
Lately I have been trying to use AI more and more to do all kinds of stuff: from running Refactoring things, to writing code for my countless side projects. I say try because for someone like me who has spent, in many cases, 10+ years doing things the same way, it’s not always easy (or, more accurately, it’s always not easy) to change these very ways.
I am also aware that this inertia creates all kinds of biases, like thinking “this doesn’t work” when in reality it’s just my brain begging me to revert to old workflows. But all-in-all, outcome-wise, AI is a net positive to almost everything I tried to use it for.
How can I be sure?
Well, it’s usually one of two things: it either makes me faster, or allows me to create higher quality output. Many engineering teams I know struggle at measuring these, but I have a big advantage: as a content creator, my work is extremely repetitive, so it’s trivial to see impact on any of these dimensions.
So I can say with confidence that AI almost always helps with at least one of the two.
However, other than pure output, I have also been trying to pay attention to how using AI makes me feel about doing work. And here is the concerning part: I often feel… dumber.
Dumber than when I don’t use AI, that is.
“Less engaged” is probably more correct than “dumber”, but the result is the same: my brain enters a seemingly different mode, a lazier one, which is hard to steer back into full active mode.
(this feeling seems to be confirmed by recent research about writing essays with vs without ChatGPT, which contributed to trigger me to write this post)
I call it create mode vs review mode, and it’s not just about AI 👇