Thinking for yourself in the age of AI

The artificial intelligence wave is here. Thanks to the arrival of “large language models” like ChatGPT and other generative AI tools almost a year and a half ago, AI is now hitting us like a truck – head on.

We all remember the dire predictions several years back. AI will take over your job, it will spread disinformation like you wouldn’t believe, deepfakes will be ubiquitous, nefarious actors and regimes will lap it up and use it against us, and soon AI will become sentient and realize it can throw humans into the trash bin.

Well, some of that has certainly come to pass. Election disinformation bots, deepfake nudes, China and Russia ’s frantic race to harness AI for their own authoritarian ends – these are just a few of the headlines in recent days.

But doomsday scenarios of AI taking over the world or turning you into an Energizer Bunny à la "The Matrix "? That was a great movie (way ahead of its time) and we can understand the anxiety, but for now, let’s take it down a notch or two.

Dystopian fears distract us from what AI and other technologies are doing to us right now on a more mundane level. AI promises to liberate us from tedious tasks by automating them away, but the risk is that we’re automating away much more than that – our own intuitions and unique thought processes. Let’s just say thinking.

These ideas flashed in my head as I read an essay by the 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer titled “On thinking for yourself.” It’s only a few pages long and certainly worth reading.

In many ways, books were Schopenhauer’s form of AI. For him, if you’re always reading, then you’re never thinking for yourself. “For reading forcibly imposes on the mind thoughts that are as foreign to its mood and direction at the moment of reading as the signet is to the wax upon which it impresses its seal,” he writes.

“Reading is merely a surrogate for thinking for yourself; it means letting someone else direct your thoughts,” he adds. So put down that damn book! You can almost hear the old grump himself (Schopenhauer had a reputation for being one) yelling at you from the grave.

Thinking for yourself…hmm…what does it mean? Schopenhauer says it is “following your own inclinations” or “basic thoughts,” which only you can understand through and through. These are your truths. The next step is to order and compare these truths to other truths.

Let’s say you do this and come to a new understanding or insight. Congrats, you’ve gone organic! But what happens if someone else has already discovered it and written it down in some book? Schopenhauer says the insight will still be “a hundred times more valuable if you have arrived at it by thinking for yourself.” For it has “entered into your thought-system as an integral part and living member… thus it will stay firmly and forever lodged in your mind.”

Self-thinking gives us immense power, he concludes. By exercising it, we’re like an absolute monarch without anyone above us.

Now that’s wonderful and humanistic sounding, but let’s get real, nobody’s going to do it. Give up books or reading the thoughts of others? Yeah, sure thing Herr Schopenhauer.

And what to do about AI? Well, we’re not going back. We have no choice but to develop it further while (hopefully) working just as hard to devise safeguards that address the societal and global ills it will inevitably spawn (or has already). AI’s potential for good – helping us devise new drugs to cure diseases for example, among other benefits – is simply too great. Plus, increasingly sketchy regimes like China and Russia will march forward on AI anyway. So should we (although not march).

But let’s get back to Mr. Grump for a second before concluding. How can we mold Schopenhauer’s ideas into ones we can use today?

The self-thinker, he writes, “becomes acquainted with the authorities for his opinions only after he has acquired them and merely as a confirmation of them.” In other words, self-thinkers first come up with their own ideas and only after that measure them against the thoughts of others, or increasingly in our case, a machine. Not a bad idea.

Before using ChatGPT for answers or Googling or YouTubing our questions away, it might be fruitful to take a microsecond to think first. What do we believe about this topic? What are we expecting to discover? And how does this inquiry help us advance our goals?

“How to debone a Salmon filet”? OK, maybe not these kinds of questions, but more consequential ones.

It might be useful to jot down our ruminations before heading off into AI Neverland. At least it’s a way to slow things down a bit, helping us become better acquainted with our own minds, and forcing us to be more purposeful about how we use tech – as an aide to our thinking and not just a driver of it.

And, let’s face it, these dug-out-of-the-past ideas and practices can also serve us as acts of human defiance in the face of fast-paced technological change. They remind us of our connection to humans long ago and help us preserve our humanity going forward, as we sail briskly into uncharted waters.