The Cognitive Hazards of Widespread Chatbot Use
My latest smartphone update came with an easy-access chatbot button that was hard to disable; I doubt most users will bother, let alone figure out how. There is, I think, a risk of creating cognitive disabilities by providing too-easy access to chatbots, the way one can develop a physical disability by persistent restrictions of motion. To some extent, all cognitive-enhancing technologies do this; people who write don't develop oral and memory skills; people who use calculators don't learn paper and pencil computational skills, people who grow up with photography don't learn to draw. But unlike writing, calculators, and so on, chatbots are not aids to cognition but replacements for it—and a replacement that is controlled by someone else. If a child writes, there are still writing words and ideas that have at least passed through the child's mind; chatbots entirely bypass this, inserting ideas from an external source; routine chatbot use interferes with thought. There i...