Embracing a Human-Centered Approach (4)

Strive to Understand Downstream Impacts:With everything you do, always consider the wider and “downstream” impacts of your actions. A hallucination that goes uncaught and gets posted, for example, on your blog, could later appear in search results for someone else. It’s like pouring chemicals down a drain that eventually contaminate our water supply permanently. Little by little, the impact compounds until we are all affected. Take responsibility for what you produce to ensure it is properly tested and vetted. In business settings, the stakes are even higher—AI-driven decisions, especially when baked into a product or service, can impact countless lives.

Advocate for Responsible AI: If you transition from light personal use to wider-scale rollouts that could impact others, rigorous evaluation, testing, and a deep understanding of AI’s risks and limitations are paramount. In a corporate setting, consult your responsible AI team about guidelines and best practices. If your company lacks such a team, consider advocating for the formation of one.

Responsible AI Is an Ongoing Journey

This book focuses specifically on the early learning stages of using AI and is not meant to provide full guidance on responsible AI practices. While I touch on the new risks and tradeoffs of AI, to give these topics the depth and nuance they deserve I suggest starting with the additional resources I’ve curated for you on my website, ThinkwithAI.org. I take this approach so I can use these pages to zero in on one important angle of AI: giving everyone an accessible entry point to using AI to help them think—and create—at a higher level.

As we move beyond learning about AI’s capabilities to incorporating AI more into our lives and work, I believe our responsibilities increase as well. It’s crucial that we all labor to better understand and mitigate the risks and implications AI introduces to our world, thus increasing the chances that AI will ultimately enable human flourishing.

As your use of AI grows, keep researching and learning, and I encourage you to immerse yourself in broader conversations on the ethics of AI. I hope you will be inspired to lend your voice to advocate for the responsible and transparent use of AI among your peers, family, community, teams, and the organizations you are a part of.

It is a familiar pattern for us to be fearful of new technology and the implications we don’t fully understand. When electricity was introduced in the 19th century it was seen as a dangerous, mysterious force that many were afraid to use. And this was not unfounded: early electrical wires and appliances were often poorly insulated and posed real fire and electrocution risks. Even U.S. President Benjamin Harrison was reportedly scared to use the light switches in the White House—leaving it to his staff to turn the lights on and off.

Part One:Beyond Human Cognition

5. Why Think with AI?

Suddenly, anyone who can write or speak can easily tap into powerful new machine intelligence to boost their intellectual firepower and ability to create.

Today’s AI offers us a creative, “imaginative” thought partner that can tackle open-ended goals and support us even if our thinking is still messy and raw. It “understands” our human way of communicating. For the first time, we can use software to truly help us think.

Meet your new “thought machine.” No matter who you are, what demands you face, or what dreams and aspirations you have, you can harness the vast corpus of human knowledge these tools have ingested and channel it to help you with anything you want to do, achieve, or create—all without technical expertise or coding skills.

Just how much knowledge are we talking about? Today’s most advanced AI systems can ingest eight trillion words—equivalent to reading about 100 million books . . . in a single month of training.1 It would take a human, reading every day for eight hours, more than 180,000 years to read that many books. (That’s over 2,000 lifetimes!)[i] By collaborating with AI, you can boost your own cognitive power by having the incredible computational power of these machines behind you, opening doors to new solutions and ideas you might never have reached on your own.

These tools are so potent that they’re poised to reshape the landscape of personal and professional success, as well as organizational performance. Those who learn to tap into AI’s power have cognitive leverage. They will be able to achieve more and perform better, while those who don’t risk falling behind in an increasingly AI-augmented world.

This is why it’s time to learn how to Think with AI.

Thinking with AI is not about using AI as a substitute for the work of our own brain. While AI will become increasingly capable of making and acting on decisions for us without our intervention, this book pursues a different goal. This book focuses on strategically enhancing our own cognitive abilities while keeping our uniquely human vision and creativity at the core.

Thinking with AI is collaborating with AI to amplify our human performance so we can achieve something we aren’t capable of on our own.

This approach puts human ingenuity at the helm and frees our brain to focus on where it’s really needed. It’s about using the tools to do more of what we’re uniquely good at—the things the machines can’t do. AI plays a supporting role, helping us extract more strategic and creative thinking from our own minds. These new thought machines can work for us by rapidly generating new ideas, revealing unexpected angles, surfacing ideas we’ve overlooked, quickly testing and improving hypotheses, uncovering unexpected connections in complex systems, finding patterns in massive data sets, handling tedious grunt work, personalizing and accelerating our learning process, and much more.

While much has been said about AI’s potential to boost productivity, we’re exploring a more transformative opportunity here. This is about enhancing your cognitive performance. It’s like having a tireless, always-ready collaborator helping you learn faster, understand more deeply, and create at a higher level. And it’s just a click away—once you understand the basics of managing this new relationship.

In front of you is the opportunity to tap into this unprecedented reservoir of knowledge and processing power to take you beyond the natural limits of your human brain.

Our Magnificent, Fallible Human Brain