Workspace AI - More of a BANE than a BOON?

Though the conversation on AI whether it is good or bad has become cliché lately, I still am writing this article because I've been seeing its effects so clearly everyday right in front of me in my workplace, where my colleagues and I are highly dependent on AI. It is pathetic to see ourself turning towards AI whenever some task is assigned to us. The fact of us not even consider thinking ourself and jumping on it right away really makes me worried.

Of course, AI makes our work efficient and saves more time by helping us with our mundane repetitive tasks. I really appreciate that automation aspect of AI. But what I want to discuss here is the AI chatbots which jump in as a search engine, teacher, or even a mentor. That's good and great. But I feel that it is also time to look at what it takes away from us - our creativity.

Yes, the one that makes us unique and also powered our civilization. But now... it is coming to an end...

You can think that the AI can be creative, think on its own and provide us solutions by us not even sweating a bit. But should it happen at a cost of our own creativity?

Think about a scenario where the future-world is fully powered and run by AI, where it becomes our government, teacher, scientist and so on, where it is almost our brain - our intelligence. Now, what if the energy to fuel it is exploited? Or there arises an issue with it and it stops functioning? It is like our brain is off, right?

Now, would we be able to think about any solution? Would we be able to repair it? We wouldn't have such intelligence, right?

It would be funny then to expect AI again to answer us to repair the same AI. Though it is just a funny hypothetical scenario, it still worth imagining this way, right? That is why I feel that our creativity is so important like other basic needs - our thought power.

Another scenario is when the ownership of AI becomes monopolised or becomes a luxury if corporates jump on the bandwagon. Scary as it sounds.

But even amidst this awareness, it is still challenging to stay away from such chatbots because of peer pressure. It is concerning that we might miss out the chance to stand toe-to-toe with our peers on the performance metrics and be seen inefficient, while everyone else works using chatbots and stays ahead.

I feel that the decline of our brain power initially started with the rise of Internet, when we got the luxury to finish the time-consuming head-scratching essay works using Google. If you think about it for a moment, you can realize that you barely even remember some mobile numbers. We don't store anything on our brain but on internet. And, the AI, now, does nothing new but making it worse - not just being able to remember, but also not even being able to think.

Using internet, we don't LEARN, we ONLY USE.

The bottom line is that I don't mean that we should avoid using the AI Chatbots or Internet but to downsize our dependence on it and use our superpower also. AI is definitely a treasure but it aligns very well with an old saying - Too much of anything is good for nothing.