GPS Stole Our Sense of Direction. AI Is Coming for Our Sense of Self.

Did your parents have a good sense of direction?

Mine did. As a kid, I could show my dad any address in town, and he’d know how to get there, no map required.

I can barely find my way around my own neighborhood without Google Maps.

In one generation, we’ve lost our collective sense of direction, a phenomenon backed by years of research showing our smartphones have rendered us navigationally dumb. “The greater use of GPS, the greater decline in spatial memory over time,” says a 2020 study from McGill University.

It’s about to get much worse.

Our increasing reliance on AI may deprive us not just of our sense of direction, but of our sense of self. We risk ceding to machines the core elements of our humanity: our ability to think critically, to make independent decisions, to express ourselves in words.

AI “doomers” believe the rise of superintelligent machines will have unknowable side effects that could trigger the apocalypse – possibly in a matter of hours once the machines become self-improving. “Accelerationists,” meanwhile, think AI could free us from the ravages of war, disease, climate change, and – maybe most appealing of all – the 9-to-5 grind.

This is an important debate, one of the most important humans have ever faced. But its focus on the future obscures what AI is already doing to our brains, right here in the present.

The human brain is always changing in response to its environment, a concept called “neural plasticity.” Brains are especially plastic during childhood, but even the elderly retain “considerable plasticity,” according to researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas.

Think of the brain as a collection of muscles: The ones we exercise get stronger, while the ones we neglect wither away–a process impacted by culture, climate, geography, the tools we use, and much more. For instance, the rise of the printing press may have caused a deterioration in the parts of the brain that once enabled the bards of old to memorize Odyssey-length poems. The calculator likely atrophied our capacity for mental math.

So what’s the big deal? Isn’t our brain’s response to AI just the natural next step in the unstoppable tide of technological advancement?

Yes and no.

Let’s return to the GPS example. Sometimes I miss having a sense of direction that exists in my brain instead of in my phone, especially when I’m driving somewhere with spotty cell service. I’d like to believe, though, that I retain my basic humanity nonetheless, even if I sometimes drift into a robotic haze while following step-by-step GPS directions.

But Open AI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot, and other chatbots powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) are now handling some of the very functions that give our lives meaning. They’re finishing our sentences. Responding to texts and emails from friends and lovers. Reading books and summarizing them for us. Optimizing our to-do lists. Picking our kids’ Christmas presents. Planning our vacations. Doing our research. And, most unsettling of all, they’re making our decisions.

Executives are now urging employees to make AI their “thought partner,” to use the latest corporate buzz term, and a cottage industry of online courses has cropped up teaching wannabe superachievers how to leverage AI to augment decision-making and “sharpen your point of view,” according to one class description from Coursera.

But where’s the line between using AI as a “thought partner” and allowing AI to think for us? And, if AI is helping “sharpen your point of view,” how can you be sure it’s not subtly steering you toward viewpoints that benefit the large tech companies that own these powerful models?

Recent research suggests the line is already being blurred.

A study released in January from the SBS Swiss School found a “significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities.” The results, based on surveys and interviews with 666 participants, are particularly worrisome for those with developing brains: “Younger participants exhibited higher dependence on AI tools and lower critical thinking scores compared to older participants.”

One participant told researchers, “I find myself using AI tools for almost everything—whether it’s finding a restaurant or making a quick decision at work. It saves time, but I do wonder if I’m losing my ability to think things through as thoroughly as I used to.” Another said, “The more I use AI, the less I feel the need to problem-solve on my own.”

What’s to be done about all this?

I described AI above as a tide that can’t be stopped, and I think it would be futile to try – just like small-time farmers couldn’t stop the rise of the tractor. But we can take steps to limit AI’s impact on our brains, both as a society and individually. Schools should require students to read long books, write essays, and do in-depth research without AI assistance, the same way they still teach long division despite the calculator.

For individuals, I propose a Severance-inspired separation: Like the characters on the hit TV show, we should wall off the personal from the professional. We have little choice but to integrate AI into our work lives; otherwise, we risk being left behind. But in our personal lives, we should resist the urge to offload cognitive tasks to AI, no matter how convenient, or else we could lose the ability to do those cognitive tasks ourselves.

Get lost in a book. Keep a journal. Dive into a lengthy research paper about a topic that interests you. Make handwritten to-do lists. Write a love letter to your partner. Wander.

In other words: Keep doing the mental tasks that make us human.

Or, as ChatGPT advised when I sent it this column and asked for a response, “When you use me, do so with eyes wide open.”