MSP374. The Human Reservation

We ended with an interesting story about something called Chat TJB, which is a chat bot that is actually a a human being.

And we talk kind of briefly about the idea of cognitive surrender, this idea that we're surrendering our decision-making abilities to machines, not just where we need help, but for, you know, just the sheer mind-numbing convenience of it.

And how this kind of dovetails with that chat TJB art project, where...

the artist behind it found that people were looking for a more human connection in a world where automation and agents and AI are becoming increasingly the norm.

And that's what I kind of want to continue to talk about today.

the kind of ways people and communities can push back against AI and the infrastructure that supports it, and some of the ways that experts or one expert in particular thinks we can find some balance or harmony between the you know, the grey goo of the machines and the organic that's us.

So last week I asked you about the idea of cognitive surrender and the tendency we have to ask machines questions that we know we can actually answer ourselves.

And you did admit that you sometimes fall into that trap.

So have you made an effort to stop yourself doing that since we spoke last week? And if not...

You know, what's something that you asked AI this week that you could quite easily have come up with and answer yourself?

so I actually have taken the effort to try and stop so I basically only go to it if I'm really tired and if I don't really want to brain something out so like for example I think this week there's a whole bunch of games coming out in September so I asked GPT give me the top three out of the whole list give me the best three that I should be going for because I really didn't want to like brain out the price cost and how much was it so I was just like just tell me the top three why yeah

I mean, okay, I think that's probably fair enough.

And you did mention that point of, you know, being tired.

And that kind of goes to the point I want to make, which is about cognitive offloading.

So I think last year, I think it was episode 311, we talked about this process of cognitive load, the amount of effort it takes the brain to process information.

And the shortcuts, which are often subconscious, that we take to offload some of those tasks.

You know, it's that kind of sensation that we sometimes have of muscle memory kicking in because, of course, muscle memory doesn't actually exist.

And it allows us to do, you know, certain repetitive tasks while just running a kind of subroutine in the brain without overtaxing our brains.

And often we do this, or more often now, we do this kind of cognitive offloading physically.

We might set an alarm or reminder to do a task.

We might use a calculator to do some sums, to add some stuff up.

And that frees up our brains to, you know, watch AI-generated cat videos, which is the only legally permissible use of AI slop.

My current favourite, courtesy of my wife, are Cats performing songs by ACDC, The Strokes and other bands.

So it's Cats as rock bands, which is just absolutely fantastic.

But anyway, cognitive offloading isn't bad in and of itself because, you know...