Our minds aren’t equipped to handle AI

AI is junk food for the mind; easy, tempting and ultimately very bad for you. Norbert Wiener, godfather of cybernetics, once said, “The thought of every age is reflected in its technique.” For the past century, our thought has been reflected in our computers, including by those in the AI industry. Google’s Demis Hassabis calls the brain “a biological approximation to a Turing machine.” Elon Musk puts it more bluntly, declaring that “people should just think of the brain as a biological computer.” (Musk’s brain often worries me.) But humans are more complex than a straightforward comparison to computers gives us credit for — and far more than most of the AI industry seems to appreciate. And as their products push ever deeper into culture, this helps explain why they’re making such a mess. AI, it turns out, is something like a cognitive version of a hot dog: It appeals to us in the moment, but undermines the health and sustainability of cognitive systems we’ve evolved over several millennia. To understand the problem, we’ll need a little neuroscience and the entirety of human evolutionary history. The idea that brains are computers traces back to Alan Turing. It posits thought as…