It’s so, so easy to learn things these days.
We’ve been blessed with informational abundance for years, the internet bringing us wonders like the search engine, Wikipedia, and instructional YouTube videos that walk us through everything from changing the oil on our specific car model, to mastering the kalimba finger harp. Newer tools like AI chatbots flail as often as they impress, but they’re also rapidly becoming part of the online world’s sprawling card catalog, which is making some types of information and content even more accessible.
All of this modern informational ease presents its own, new problem, though.
Even when these things do genuinely help us out, struggle and effort are fundamental to learning. If we immediately hand things off to these systems rather than fumbling and toiling through the learning process, we miss out on the potential for growth and leave ourselves more reliant on these tools.
This is a pernicious issue because, again, it’s really wonderful and cool that we can foist tedious, cumbersome responsibilities onto autonomous systems that will handle them for us, often with pretty decent outcomes. It’s probably not great, though, that in doing so we deprive ourselves of the valuable frictions that might otherwise stoke cognitive development and personal resiliency.
I don’t know what the ideal balance is, here. I suspect eventually we’ll reach a point where these sorts of systems are handling a lot of the annoying, dangerous, repetitive work, freeing us up to do other sorts of things that are effortful and exertive, if in a different way.
Right now, though, we’re living through a period in which earlier paradigms haven’t yet been replaced by new ones, and in which the incentives are nudging us toward offloading as much work to the bots as possible, damn the consequences.
I’m personally trying my best to ensure that every struggle I offload is replaced by another something-or-other that demands I think and work and imagine and do. But maintaining this kind of habit is itself effortful, and that means the same neural reflexes that want us to save energy by delegating to AI tools are likely to push back against any plans to replace one type of cognitive labor with another.
The struggle to continue struggling is real, in other words. And that will likely be the case until something fundamental changes about how we think, not just how we perform thinking tasks.
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