If you’ve been following all the news about AI (and boy there sure is a lot of it!) you may have come across the idea of “AI brainrot”, the concept of a cognitive surrender to an AI system to do the thinking for us.
While in certain uses AI can seem miraculous, it’s important to remember that it’s artificial intelligence for a reason – it is not sentient, but is instead a very good prediction engine, continually guessing at what we might want next.
In my own experience paying attention to AI influencers, supposed thought leaders, and tech journalists, I’ve noticed that there’s an absolute fire of FOMO stoked high to create anxiety that the person describing the next great thing produced with AI is way ahead of where you sit.
About a year and a half into the washing machine cycle of constant rotation of a sea of commentary, I’ve finally come to terms with the fact that most of what is shared is noise.
As someone who has worked on very complex backend systems for decades, I can tell you that automation does not fix everything. If you have a problem where AI automation, or agentic AI, can go in and fully automate a task for you without sacrificing something in the process, what you’re doing isn’t that complicated, really.
Humans are messy beings. We create messy data. We eschew certain patterns of behavior while following others, on a whim. Most things we involve ourselves in are not clear cut, and that fuzziness is the core of commercial economic activity – a business serves customers or clients by solving problems, and the problems exist because life is just not that simple. And evolutionarily, outsmarting other humans and animals has been the way to get ahead, and that has primarily been done through tooling, because making tools is what humans for millennia have been good at figuring out.
At first glance, using AI tools feels like a continuation in that tradition. Let’s say you’re clever and you’ve decided to use AI tools to do something that saves you time and thus gives you an advantage – fantastic. However, the catch is that using these tools does not advance our own knowledge much (if at all) and the output though generally good is rarely great.
I for one am not willing to move the standard from “great” to “good enough” for anything I do. Craft is not dead. Good enough is not great. Humans need to be inline in the process for exceptional work, exceptional thinking, and exceptional creativity to occur. If we collectively choose to opt-out of deep cognition and opt-in to laziness, culture, society and business will ultimately suffer.
And at the end of the day, unfortunately the analogy of AI being Pandora’s box is an understatement. What we have is a Pandora’s box that is building and opening thousands of other Pandora’s boxes every day all by itself. While part of this is terrifying, there are aspects of living in a period of rapid change that are exhilarating (in a good way). But it's our responsibility to actively participate in the shaping of what lies ahead, whether that is by acceptance, resistance, or iteration. May we live in interesting times!