(written by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and audio by Timothy Andres Pabon)

This isn’t a long book. I read it in two days, and it’s leaving an impression. While we’re thinking about AI and the impact on our lives, this book attempts to think about what we choose to do with that information, rather than simply what AI is capable of.

Yes, there are studies about AI being able to make humans dumber. There are increasing abilities to try to take on our creative tasks. Plus a seeming effect to make humans into the product of whatever is most predictable. This book is not to discredit the long distance that AI has come in the previous years, but also to talk about our choices.

I found the quizzes at the end of each chapter engaging. Patience and narcissism, distractions and bias all flavor our contact with AI. The algorithms are meant to predict better things to claim our distraction. We fall into it by allowing our time to be taken up by social media, movies, music, and anything else that can be predicted by such things.

While I have cultivated patience as an author, with knowledge that novels are long endeavors and possibly longer response times if I send them out to slush piles, I see my children and my peers who have not worked through such difficult things as very relatable. Digital narcissism is hard for me, as one who isn’t good at promoting myself (hand me someone else’s book that I love and I’ll pitch it to anyone gladly instead of my own), yet I can understand how to fall prey to that one, too. The bias that humans have is baked into our creations with AI, and we can find ways to rise above it or to fall into the trap of believing that there’s no way to get better.

I read a lot about AI. I like learning, I’m curious, and I have no one telling me what to research or try to understand on any given day. I struggle with using AI because of the environmental effects, and how much a person can stop thinking critically (like not double-checking for AI hallucinations?) by using social media, the algorithms, and simply getting by. However, I’m also an artist, and the promise of AI is to connect to data sets that are beyond my own collecting, and to somehow harness learning that it would take more than a lifetime to accumulate on my own. I do not want AI to create my art, though I would love to find a way to make it do all the mundane tasks for me instead, especially if we could make it environmentally friendly. (Who said AI could have clean water but humans can’t?)

Sometimes reading a book like this can make me feel alone- I am always trying to learn more, to figure out how the world works or what I/we can do to be better. The idea that this makes humans unique, and that we should lean into what we’re doing well is refreshing. It can be heavy knowledge to think that kids in school aren’t learning critical thinking because they’re using too many digital devices, that the algorithms never let them be bored to find out their own passions, and that the damage cannot be undone.

I’m curious about the idea that we’re all digital narcissists, though. At least, heavy users of social media seem to be, by giving out more information than most of us might usually be privy to, by accessing their page. This is tough, because at some point we want to have some privacy and yet we need to share information so that we can stop the stigma of many conditions. Maybe that’s what we hope to achieve by oversharing our life details.

The author wants humans to be more what makes humans great – using ingenuity, creativity, and cohesion to do marvelous things. We went to the moon with when computers were less advanced than our current calculators. A woman who began programming had printed out her code and it stood taller than her head – I think it was for the lunar module. We created so many things, and yet we also created AI, algorithms, and the digital landscape that we can lose ourselves in if we’re not careful. This book makes me think about how not just I, but also the we in humanity, can decide whether to allow ourselves to become more human or more predictable by how we interact with digital devices and their AI and algorithmic cohort. I’m ready for this kind of hope.