Acervo curado
Acervo curado
Dan Koe
·📬Newsletter
Humans are getting stupider because of AI & how to become more intelligent than 99% of AI users
The internet went insane when MIT released the study called Your Brain on ChatGPT.
In short, it confirmed what all the anti-AI people were thinking.
Using AI makes you dumb.
The study found that those who relied on ChatGPT showed the weakest brain connectivity and lowest memory retention, with lingering effects even after discontinuing AI use.
Another study by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon found that overreliance on AI often led to diminished analytical engagement and cognitive atrophy.
As always, you give an inch and they'll take a mile. You give them a study, they'll read the headline and lock in their answer - closing themselves off to further learning.
AI religions are very real.
Some believe AI is God while others believe it is the work of the devil.
There are communities that reinforce beliefs and identity. People maintain beliefs about AI despite evidence and experience. They regurgitate what they hear from prophecies and prophets.
As you'll find, thinking for yourself is a crucial aspect of using AI, so if you can't do that due to being indoctrinated into the anti-AI religion, you won't benefit much from this letter. Please see your way out.
Here's what we need to talk about:
AI only makes you dumb if you are already dumb.
If you are smart, AI has the ability to make you much smarter.
If you haven't used AI to the point of being able to form your own opinion, that is a crystal clear sign of low consciousness. In other words, you are largely unaware that calling AI users dumb is hypocritical, and you may as well be talking to a mirror.
AI is the great amplifier.
Here's how to become more intelligent than 99% of people using AI.
By the end, you'll know how to avoid melting your brain, why AI makes 90% of people dumb, and 3 ways to use AI to become smarter.
As we discussed in HUMAN 3.0, level 1 (red) thinking is characterized by:
When low-consciousness people use AI (or demonize AI), it amplifies what's already there.
These are the types of people who try to have AI create everything for them. They demand it to write their essays, write viral content, answer questions without earning the answer, and tell them how to live their life.
The glaring problem here is that low-consciousness individuals are also low-agency. They are assigned goals by their parents, teachers, and culture. They don't care about these goals. School, job, retire. They aren't meaningful. So it's obvious why these people try to shortcut the process. Learning isn't pleasurable to them, it's torture. Effort isn't rewarding, so they put in as little of it as they have to to scrape by. They take any shortcut available to them because they simply don't care about mastery in a domain they did not choose by their own discovery.
So, I agree that AI is making people dumb, but it's not making everyone dumb, and if that doesn't make you excited about how such a powerful tool can change your life, I don't know what to tell you.
High-consciousness people who think at Level 3, on the other hand, leverage AI so that they can focus more on their self-generated meaningful goals.
They outsource tasks that free up cognitive capacity so they can think more, from a higher level. They simulate their own mental processes with elegant prompt engineering. They hold a firm grip on their craft and minimize how much AI dictates their direction. I will never give up my writing, so I need to pay mind to how much AI reaches into it. But that doesn't mean I don't use AI for things like research and pattern matching, it means that my writing process has changed to benefit from a new tool.
Doing this well requires a big shift in how you live your life.
Throughout history, it has been a common practice for people to "check" their thinking against what other smart people believe to ensure that it holds weight.
When you're unsure about what to do, you read books and acquire knowledge.
When you seek advice, you look up an expert opinion or talk to a smart friend.
When you are unconfident, you search for evidence that encourages you to act.
(But that doesn't mean any of that is true or the best way to go about it).
This is nothing new.
The anti-AI people do it every day.
And newsflash, AI has immediate access to almost any knowledge or opinion you would ever want to find. That's both dangerous and powerful.
The Greeks, as an example, had various competing philosophical schools (like Plato's academy or Aristotle's Lyceum) that would attract students based on reputation and philosophical alignment. People gravitated toward teachers whose ideas resonated with them or whose lifestyle they admired. They pursued teachers who could best challenge their thinking in alignment with their own goals.
Socrates himself didn't run a school, but he would engage with students who regularly sought him out for these types of conversations.
The modern manifestation of this is the creator economy. There are more schools of thought than ever, and you can align your goals with incredibly smart people. But many underdeveloped people can be loud and distracting simply because the barrier of entry is an internet connection.
There is one key distinction here.
These teachers had a life that backed up their ideas. They had proven themselves in multiple domains, from being a wise teacher and a great warrior. They could endure hardship.
AI can't do that, and since most AI tools are tuned to be a consumer product marketed toward the general public, it can absolutely make you stupid. On the other hand, AI can mimic reasoning and emotion quite well, because examples of those are abundant.
So, how do you use AI in a way that makes you smarter?
Well, you do what smart people do whether AI exists or not:
You understand that the first teaching in any form of education should be to question the teachings. You hold every idea in the realm of possibility and test it against reality before accepting it as truth.
You don't trust an idea or belief just because an authority figure said it.
You don't take Socrates' advice just because he's Socrates. Even Socrates would tell you that. Hell, Socrates was skeptical of books because he believed you should learn to reason on your own.
You don't listen to your parents, who probably don't have the life you want to live, when it comes to how to direct your life. You don't take politicians', public intellectuals', or any flawed human's word as law. And you especially don't latch onto a belief that AI is bad and allow confirmation bias to reinforce that belief until you become as dumb as a rock.
Outsourcing your thinking to some other perceived authority figure (when authority is a concept for the incompetent and unconfident) has always been a problem.
You should never surrender your agency – or your responsibility to think – to interpreted human authority.
You must earn your consciousness.
You must discover the insight yourself through the practical application of knowledge in the pursuit of a self-generated and preferably meaningful goal.
And that comes through approaching AI from the lens of a skeptic, experimenting before accepting, and being willing to shed beliefs that no longer serve you.
You can, and should, seek others' knowledge to improve your decision-making (every generation starts from a new baseline of progress thanks to knowledge being stored and passed down), but that doesn't mean you latch onto one belief and prevent your mind from further growth, because truth is contextual to your values and goals, and those almost never align perfectly with someone else.
The good thing is, if you learn how to use AI, you can amplify this process more than has ever been possible.
AI isn't the variable that makes people dumb.
YOU are the variable. Your level of consciousness. AI doesn't just force you into becoming dumb the second you use it. That's a dumb way to look at it. Personal responsibility is more important than ever.
The core difference between level 1 and level 3 is the pursuit of truth.
Level 1 places the values of their birthview (their worldview assigned/conditioned at birth) above truth.
Level 2 places success and status above truth.
This is obviously dangerous, because if any value is placed above truth – like love, money, academia, or even family – it becomes corrupt because it is built on lies.
Religion above truth leads to dogmatic thinking from a lack of questioning.
Money above truth leads to tech CEOs who know their algorithms rot the brains of children for the sake a maintaining profit margins.
Love above truth leads to a new-age woman chasing men who give her the strongest feelings, creates fantasies about these men because she just trusts love, those men cheat on her but she gaslights herself rather than faces reality (truth), then gets lost in a fake spirituality, goes off to Burning Man, does psychedelics and gets one-shotted, then joins a cult because they love bomb yet exploit her.
Level 3 realizes that the pursuit of anything but truth leads to a horrible downward spiral into deeper layers of self-deception.
With AI, all of these false realities across any domain, topic, interest, or situation become possible. That's horrifying. Again, AI is the great amplifier, and if you are living in a world of lies (see: the pure anti-AI crowd, and the pure pro-AI crowd) AI will only speed up your descent into hell.
That said, many smart people are using AI to do things they've never done before.
They're reading more, because AI can spew out mostly accurate information. You can create your own book as if it were a choose-your-own-adventure game driven by curiosity on a specific topic you want to explore.
[Full body continues with: thought partner prompting, intellectual architecture & synthesis using worldview master guides for thinkers, externalizing your creative processes — full text in source]
– Dan
Dan Koe
@thedankoe · Self-improvement / One-person business
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“Humans are getting stupider because of AI & how to become more intelligent than 99% of AI users”
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Humans are getting stupider because of AI & how to become more intelligent than 99% of AI users
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