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August 30, 2024 - artificial intelligence cognitive augmentation future tech
The current capacity of an uninhibited, curious, and enterprising human paired with AI is capable of a new order of magnitude of creativity and discovery. There’s a whole new way of being available through this. Chatbots promise to take us to new realms, extending our intellectual power more profoundly than pencils or computers ever did.
My long-term goal is to increase the reliability and ROI of AI. Short-term, I aim to engage in what appears to be a marketing game—helping people see the value in using chatbots. This helps keep me grounded and renders explicit the benefits I seem to be engaging.
The pencil enabled the brain to store and iterate on symbolic objects after retrieval from memory. The computer broadened this application, reducing countless barriers surrounding cognitive action. However, both operated on a retrieval-dependent plane—you had to think of a word to leverage their benefits.
Retrieval-dependent cognition refers to our ability to work with information after we’ve recalled or accessed it from our memory. Traditional tools like pencils and computers enhance this process but are limited by what we can remember. Augmented cognition, enabled by AI, occurs when the tool actively participates in the thinking process, offering relevant information and ideas beyond our immediate recall. This shift allows for a more dynamic and expansive cognitive experience.
With AI, the ROI is expansive in nature. AI chatbots can facilitate and augment our thinking, complementing and extending our cognitive capabilities. They provide value in the search box itself, engaging your thinking before and beyond what you can retrieve from memory, exemplifying augmented cognition.
The chatbot brings a vast array of relevant information and ideas, most likely related to what’s in your head, to you. It’s like having an intelligent collaborator that can fill in the gaps of your knowledge and spark new connections. AI models have uncovered an entire mine of cognitive resources where we once saw flakes of gold.
Context dependencies are the implicit assumptions and background knowledge that give meaning to information. Traditional notes or reminders often lose value over time as we forget their context. AI solves this by maintaining awareness of various contexts and efficiently translating between them. This means that even a simple note can become a springboard for broader insights and applications, as the AI can reinterpret and expand on it based on changing circumstances or needs.
A once-fixed observation becomes a dynamic, interactive object with a chatbot, thanks to its ability to navigate and translate between contexts, further exemplifying the power of augmented cognition.
The best leveraging of chatbots isn’t just to improve our retrieval-dependent tools like post-it notes. We must ask, “What can we do with this augmented cognitive capability?” We’re mostly incapable of answering this until we exercise that augmentation—as we live in a world that doesn’t suffer from the limitations of retrieval-dependent cognition, new problems and solutions will manifest.
Chatbots are an instant, generalizable amplifier of our linguistic and cognitive capabilities. They transcend context-specific semantics and translation barriers. In an AI-augmented world, we could create the solutions we need, addressing problems directly rather than searching for pre-existing tools.
Traditionally, we rely on pre-made, generalized tools and products to solve our problems. These off-the-shelf solutions often require us to adapt our needs to fit the tool, limited by our retrieval-dependent cognitive processes. In contrast, AI enables made-to-order solutions, where the tool is created or adapted specifically for our unique situation, augmenting our cognitive capabilities. This shift allows for more precise, efficient, and personalized problem-solving, potentially eliminating the compromises we often make when using standardized products.
For instance, instead of searching for a generic PDF-to-JPG converter (a retrieval-dependent approach), we can directly instruct the AI to “make this a JPG,” tailoring the solution to our specific needs (an augmented approach).
The real solutions come after we become fluent with these “for free” augmented cognitive capabilities enabled by AI. We’ll start to see previously unsolvable problems in a new light. We’ll be tasked with redefining the objects we deal with and reassessing what’s feasible in this new space of augmented cognition and context-aware problem-solving.