Outsourcing Our Minds

“Computers make excellent and efficient servants… but I have no wish to serve under them.”
– Spock, Star Trek: The Original Series

Generative AIs are answering all our questions, pondering over our every dilemma, completing all of our intellectual and personal tasks. Are we silencing our minds, by not allowing them to think? 

Technological advancement is most beneficial when it does the things that humans do not need to do. Tasks with no meaningful outcome beyond routine, survival and maintenance. Like your laundry, or your dishes.
What happens when you get an assistant to do all your thinking for you? Even searching on Google for a simple query feels like a task when an AI can understand the most specific of requests and provide a tailored answer within seconds.

Thinking is the one quality which separates us from mere animals who are driven by instincts. Without reasoning, what separates us from animals, or even each other? The separation of individual from individual is the capability of independent, creative thought. What makes you an individual in a world where even thought is outsourced?

I could've written this article with ChatGPT in mere seconds- and when this idea crossed my mind, I felt a deep, creeping shame, because it felt like I was actively losing my creative skills, my mind to the machine. A mind that truly loved writing, debating, thinking- surrendering to laziness, and the ease of a ready-made article, "freeing me" from the labor of doing what I loved most.

And when an "ease of access" technology makes creativity feel taxing, that's when you know something is going wrong.

Technology should ease our lives so that we can focus on what matters. Technology should be doing the mundane tasks. The purpose of innovation is not to do our thinking for us, but to give us more time to think, because that is what makes us truly human. Thinking.

Yes, it's a time saver. But what are we saving our time for? What are we saving our time from? From using our minds? 


-Ayesha Jaffri

Founder and Editor

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