As a neurologist with experience in understanding how the human brain functions, how do you view the intersection of artificial intelligence and human cognition?
There are a lot of different ways you might address that question, but I think one is just that we know that this technology is going to touch pretty much every aspect of our lives. It’s going to affect how we think, and how we do everything. The changes in how we navigate the world – how is that going to affect all the things that are happening inside of our head?
The other is how it can be used as a tool for us. Ultimately, it’s a tool we created and we created it conceivably for a reason. Every other tool that we have out there we thought it would do some good for us.
Now, one of the things that’s most interesting to me, the thing that has been my primary mission for a while now, is how we use our understanding of the brain and cognitive neuroscience to release the potential that’s in everybody’s mind. That every brain gives to every single human. The lens I look at this all through is “How can we use this tremendous tool for releasing human potential and augmenting human intelligence?” That for me is the most exciting thing about it. That’s what I spend a lot of time thinking about and exploring in my own life – what are the different ways we can use this technology to release our potential? To make our lives better and in that way, able to become more effective at the things that we want to do and the things we love to do.
What initially drew you to explore this area, and why do you think it holds such potential for the future?
Big picture – I was drawn just from an interest in the brain. I’ve had that for a long time, maybe partly driven by having two parents who were psychologists. So understanding human behavior was something that was around me early on. Then the brain as the source of our behavior became an interesting thing to look at. I initially pursued a degree in cognitive neuroscience in undergrad, and decided I wanted to go to medical school to become a neurologist, and focus in part on people with cognitive disorders. Where things that the brain does – thinking, memory, and language – are disrupted in some way by illness or disease. This can tell us a whole lot about our brain and is still the primary place where we’ve learned most of what we know about how the brain works, particularly how cognition works, which is all the higher-level stuff that is most unique to the human brain. So that’s how I got interested in it.
Then over time, I realized how useful this sort of thing was for understanding how to get the most out of the brains that we have. We are not given an owner’s manual for how to best use them. So there’s a lot you can learn from these different fields, cognitive neuroscience and behavioral neurology that you can apply towards understanding how to get more out of the brain that you have.
What makes the idea of augmenting human intelligence with AI exciting, and what might be some of the challenges we face in embracing it fully?
It’s exciting because personally, given what I’ve been doing in my life and given what I understand about the brain, I feel like we place too much emphasis on the differences between what different brains can do. Every brain is incredible and there’s so much potential there that most people don’t realize and a lot of it is untapped and squandered. There hasn’t been any kind of tool or technology that has this kind of potential to help solve these issues in my lifetime so far. So that’s exciting about it. I think the challenge is, and there are several, the fear that has come along with it, which comes along with any kind of new technology. But this one is unique in a lot of ways.
There are kind of two ways you can view AI and they’re not necessarily mutually exclusive. One is that it is a competitor -it’s here, it can replace us. In the worst-case scenarios, it can do terrible things to us if it gets really smart. So there’s the whole fear, which can lead people to push it away, not want to engage with it. The other framing is to see it as a collaborator, as something that enhances our lives, enhances all the things that we would care to do.
As I said, both of those things are valid to think about, but I think it’s one of the challenges and reasons that more people haven’t adopted it than might otherwise have. That fear around it and the concerns about it taking over in terms of replacing people, being used for sinister means, and so forth.
Another challenge is just for a lot of people with busy lives, how do you get the time to figure it out? Even if it’s true that it could enhance someone’s life in all sorts of ways. You still have to be able to take the time to learn how that can work. How do you do that? It doesn’t happen overnight. It is a skill referred to as AI fluency. It’s the kind of skill that we would ultimately all want to have. It’d be nice if we could upload it right away and we would all know how to do it, but, like anything, it takes repeated practice and time. So that is of course going to be a barrier for a lot of people.
To overcome those challenges, people have to realize the potential gains and what’s at stake for not engaging with it versus engaging with it.
Can you share some examples of ways AI is currently being used to enhance cognitive abilities, and what impact this has on people’s everyday lives?
We tend to break our cognitive abilities into different domains. We have things like memory and recall. We have problem solving decision-making creativity. And then the biggest of all for me is learning. In each of those categories, AI can be used to enhance any one of those features. So it can be used as a great brainstorming partner. It can think of 20 different titles for an email, or any kind of creative challenge you have. If you invite it to the table, you’re going to see a significant improvement in the number of things that you can think of. There’s been research now showing this to be true, that creativity in people who are given AI to collaborate with is greatly enhanced over people who aren’t given it. And in fact, the best benefits come from an AI and human partnership. It does better than either of those things alone. That includes creativity, problem-solving, and decision-making. It’s not a technology yet that could just be set aside and go off on its own and do great things. The best results now, and I think for the near future are going to come from these types of collaborative interactions.
For me, the most exciting potential and way it can be used, and already is being used, is as a learning aid. Imagine having access to the world’s most knowledgeable professor on whatever topic you want. Or having an expert guide you step by step towards learning. It’s possible to decrease the time it takes to learn about things or acquire a new skill. It can drastically cut down on the amount of time that it takes and make that process a whole lot more effective and efficient.
And that’s, to me, the ultimate way we augment ourselves and our own intelligence – through learning. I think a lot of people’s experience who are using it quite often find that it allows them to focus on the most enjoyable parts of their work, which are solving problems, coming up with new ideas, and learning new things. It can also relieve you of some of the more mundane stuff that takes up more time than you’d like. That too is an important way it can enhance intelligence – by freeing up our mind to spend more time on things that we care about rather than what’s called intellectual drudgery. The stuff that’s just intellectual busy work that we have to do.
What advice would you give someone who is hesitant about embracing AI as a tool for personal or professional enhancement?
I think other than addressing maybe any specific fears that would be unique to their situation, the big picture is just trying to use it for a period of time each and every day. Treat it like a partner – like having another human around who you can ask to do anything and who is sort of there to help you – you help it and you tell it what its role is, what you want it to do, and then see what it comes up with. I think that just getting in the habit of having it around and starting to use it makes us think “Oh, I have this task, I wonder how it could be helpful in doing this.” That to me is the best way to start to understand just how powerful it can be. And the best use cases are always going to be specific to every single person. How I use them, what’s the best way for me to use it is going to be different than the best way for someone else to use it.
So there isn’t a one-size-fits-all. Nobody can tell you how to best use it in your own life. The way to both become skilled at it and to answer that question and get the most out of it in your own life is just to be using it. Ethan Mollick, who’s a researcher and a professor at the Wharton School in this area, his advice is always to invite AI to the table. Meaning just have it with you. It’s going to be with us sooner or later anyway. The more in-depth we become now with having it there and knowing how to best interact with it, the better we think.
How might our understanding of human intelligence and creativity shift as AI continues to develop and integrate into our daily lives?
I think that what we are going to find inevitably are the things that right now there’s an overlap between things that humans brains do well, and AI brains do well. There are things that AI does better than human brains, like summarizing a hundred-thousand-page document in two seconds.
But then there are also definitely things that human brains still do better. And if you interact with an AI regularly, the ones that currently exist, you’ll find it has its strengths and then it has its weaknesses. And certainly, I think creativity is one of those areas, particular kinds of creativity. One thing it is not particularly good at is humor. And that’s an interesting thing. What does that say about humor? Maybe humor is a greater sign of intelligence than we even realize. That’s one example.
Overall, we’re going to find that those areas of nonoverlap are not only going to tell us more about the nature of our own intelligence, but they’re also going to become more highly valued. The things that our brains can uniquely do are going to become super valuable. So it’s an important question to know from that standpoint. And then there are certain kinds of social skills and ways of relating to people that are a form of our own intelligence that, and nuances there that AI can’t capture yet and that humans are good at. So I think those things are good. I think it allows us to appreciate things that we might’ve failed to see as either important or signs of intelligence previously.
Any final words for our readers?
My final words are probably nothing new, but I would just say too, like we talked about before, don’t fear it. I think that the best way to actually address the fear and reduce it is to use it. I think the more nebulous and abstract it seems, the easier it is to envision the worst-case scenarios. The more you understand it and become familiar with it, it’s a lot easier. It becomes less scary, and it also becomes clear what are the areas to be actually worried about in the near term and what is maybe kind of overhyped or less relevant to your own life. So I think that using it is also kind of the antidote for reducing the fear that can be associated with it.