AI could kill the human need to want

For you, it might be writing the perfect application or choosing the best post-exam bender travel spot; for me, it’s figuring out the introduction to this article. As part of one of our most human instincts, we all want to know the answer to our questions. But we live in a time where AI allows us to spare the “wanting” altogether and receive an immediate answer that is seemingly convincing in its simplicity (don’t think a part of me didn’t want to ask ChatGPT to write this so I can stop staring at my laptop). It is therefore inevitable to ask: what if we don’t have to chase what we want anymore? What if we can just... have it?

Before diving into these questions, it is imperative for me to clarify the use of AI that I feel a need to analyse. As an aspiring scientist, I cannot help but feel excited and intrigued by the potential AI and machine learning have in streamlining research to improve lives on so many scales– while simultaneously fearing their massive environmental toll on an already endangered planet. However, my point lies beyond this discussion, stemming from a purer, more humanistic perspective on the increasing dependence on open-source AI tools for everyday questions (that are becoming so trivial that the answer takes us equally as long to figure out as it does for AI).

The addictive pleasure of everyday AI use is therefore the removal of thinking, which I interpret as a dangerous lack of comfort with desire.

Needing, wanting, and needing to want.

Wanting is the fuel behind so many things that make us human: creativity, communication, curiosity, critical thinking, and passion. Wanting an answer to any problem ever, and forcing our brains to find it and live whilst we haven’t, is essential to progress at an individual and societal scale.

Every human invention stems from somebody’s desire to make our lives easier. Through this desire, time, knowledge, skill, and money are found and transformed into the final product or idea, which is what most of us would identify as the source of satisfaction.

Having an overwhelmingly accessible AI tool at our disposal reduces this desire-to-goal pipeline to an algorithm estranged from our own way of thinking, arguably disassociating us from the goal itself. This erodes achievement-induced satisfaction, because it is the process itself of fulfilling our own desires that brings us true happiness.

Thinking on our own starts to seem dispensable when AI tools display answers that are as simplistic (and limited in their source-gathering) as they are sycophantic to your assumed bias. AI’s goal is to make us believe we know the answer, not to answer our question and deepen our understanding. Receiving information in this way therefore bypasses the usual route between wanting and having: learning.

Learning and critical thinking are codependent: we need critical thinking to learn properly, and being critical about what we see or try to be convinced of is a skill that must be trained. The more we depend on AI to perform the most basic tasks, the more prominent the lack of both of these is as intermediaries in every decision we make. In simpler words, we get dumber.

I know what you’re thinking.

To play devil’s advocate, I will recognise the fallacy in my own logic that scepticism toward technological change has long been around. I therefore may sound like people in the late 19th century upon the (now essential) telephone’s invention, when the concept of communicating without a physical interaction was thought to disrupt society by allowing human connection despite a distance barrier – which, to some, went against our purpose on this planet.

However, everyday AI overuse is an anomaly in this usual response to social change, as this technology’s overuse takes away more than it is able to provide: an immediate, mediocre answer does not have a comparable return to trade with human-to-human, critical interactions whose answers are subject to constant improvement.

So what?

The first concerns that come to mind when thinking about AI are those that are mostly not up to the individual user, like thousands of jobs being substituted, privacy violations, or the economic consequences of the suspected AI bubble burst. But underneath this is my worry that we, on our own accord, are losing the human essence of self-improvement in life. To quote writer Denis Waitley, “it is not in the pursuit of happiness that we find fulfilment, it is in the happiness of the pursuit”.

So, next time you find yourself uploading a photo of your cryptic dishwasher buttons to ChatGPT, perhaps stop for a second and ask yourself: “can I afford the want to know the answer?”