You are typing an email or WhatsApp message and seeing alternate or synonymous words popup on screen. In your smartphone contact list, AI-button sits closely and expecting you to click it. In chat applications like Microsoft Teams or Google Chat, automated suggestions prompt you at every keystroke, urging you to use AI tools for help. You opened a PDF file in Adobe Acrobat Reader, AI-window or button appearing, asking if you need to summarize the content of document that you might not require. In Google Sheet or Excel workbook you are calculating, auditing or accounting data but AI-prompts at side-bar or nearby breaking your concentration. AI is constantly engaging, interfering regardless of whether we asked for an assistant. Sometime these assistances become bothersome, feels like someone standing behind you, continuously instructing you what to do, how to do it. This constant friction disrupts focus and concentration., when your brain is thinking something and processing those to organize and write/change/edit/update, a third-party tool breaks the cognitive flow.
Artificial Intelligence vs. Human Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence can excel in data processing, speeding, and perform pattern recognition, but it lacks consciousness or genuine understanding. Human Intelligence is driven by practical experience, our emotion, empathy, and intuitive moral judgment across diverse situations. AI systems are objective-oriented, data-driven, and devoid any emotional or moral context. We are heavily influenced by our emotions, intuition, and ethical aspects. Our consciousness, self-driven nature, and abstract thinking, allows us to imagine, innovate and create wonders.
Note: The author, Mohammed Asif, is a Senior IT Professional, Ex-Director of Microsoft Bangladesh, founder of Techntalents Job Platform and Chapter Lead of The AI Collective Bangladesh.
Few months back MIIT has conducted a survey on how AI impacting to our brain. The shocking study result is alarming!! They have scanned human brains (human users) who are using ChatGPT frequently and the study outcome summarized that 83% of users couldn’t remember a single sentence they wrote a minutes ago, brain activity dropped by 47% in those using AI, their writing was technically correct, but it sounds robotic and lacking depth. On the opposite side, the group that performed the best started without AI and only added it later, they showed stronger memory, brain activity, and overall performance. The study suggested while AI can help us move faster, it may also make us think less. When AI handles the heavy lifting, humans naturally think less, effectively reducing our active intelligence.
Productivity Paradox in the Modern Workplace
AI-tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude can write emails, produce reports and even attend meetings on your behalf to increase your productivity. AI-tools are residing in our day-to-day apps, emails and Smartphone and increasingly controlling what we read, watch, and interact with. If you assign AI to do your entire task, it will be doing 80% to 90% or may be full task with minimal error. But if you think deeper, you actually need to spend time to review and error fixing, you might be blank-sided the detail how your task has been done and apparently you will be gradually dropping your learning ability.
A recent article in the Daily Telegraph has highlighted how excessive AI use makes office work more stressful rather than more efficient. A recent Harvard Business Review researchers coined the term “AI brain fry”, which defined as “mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one’s cognitive capacity”. Symptoms include a loss of focus, rising stress levels, making more mistakes and a perennial sense of falling behind. AI brain fry is recognizable to anybody who has found themselves spending hours trying to offload their job to bots. A study by the Boston Consulting Group found that heavy users employing multiple AI tools simultaneously were actually less efficient and made 39% more significant errors than moderate users.
Skill Erosion threatens Career Security and livelihood
The skills and knowledge gathered through years of education and during career requires regular practice, nurturing to maintain. Instead of scaling-up our skills and capabilities, gradually we are becoming tools-dependent. Recently a primary-level school teacher recently shared that she frequently uses ChatGPT to prepare her classroom lesson. If study topics are entirely generated by AI, it raises a critical question: how can an educator effectively teach a topic they haven't deeply engaged with themselves? University teachers now-a-days frequently voice concerns about massive plagiarism as students are using AI-tools to prepare their assignment, not studying, analyzing enough. By taking help of AI for every task you are not only mentally becoming lazy but also making yourself useless.
AI has begun displacing entry-level, junior and mid-levels white color roles. It's time to think how people will survive without jobs. Elon Musk has claimed AI will make work optional. Many companies either encouraging or forcing their employees to outsource work to bots. While tech-giant’s executive often announcing about job displacement with AI, we should raise question, what alternate they have for displaced workers. People who have already spent decades in studying and working, why they would be reinvesting time and money to learn new skills. Having a job with particular skillset is key to livelihood. No one has right to replace this fundamental human right with a machine. By replacing human task with AI and Robots will not only makes human worthless but also diminishing human power and purpose. Recently conscious researchers, scholars, scientist and political leaders also voiced why AI is dangerous for Human-existence.
A Human-Centric Approach to Automation
Reading through these adverse impacts, should we stop using AI tools? The answer is No, instead we must limit its use and learn to apply selectively for routine tasks and critical needs. We should not outsource our every task to an algorithm. Traditional tools like Google or Bing search allow us to gather require data without losing our analytical role. We should not allow AI tools to gradually snatch our tasks that makes use a useless creature on earth.
We should use AI tools to enhance our productivity, not to surrender our critical thinking. Depending too much on automation degrade our thinking capacity and logical senses. Excessive use of AI tools will not only make brain lazy, inactive but also reduce capacity of logical thinking, generate ideas, memorizing, problem-solving, judging or decision-making and predicting or visualizing outcomes.
Concluding Notes
We must trust our brain, own merits and intuition. Since millions of years, Human intelligence has built civilization and advancement should continue under Human guidance. Treat AI as supporting tools, not a dependent system. Our slogan must not be AI-first or AI-Centric, it should be Human-first, Human-centric, Human-controlled.
