Embracing a Human-Centered Approach (5)

Your human brain is beautiful and astounding. When you raise your arm and catch a ball, your brain has processed a flood of complex visual information to calculate the ball’s trajectory, speed, and position. It has not only tapped into the capabilities of specialized regions of your brain to detect orientation and motion, but has also pulled in top-down processing that leverages your prior experience and the context of this specific moment to guide and refine your perception of the ball’s movement. And this all happens in a split second.

We can recognize and distinguish between thousands of faces, often with just a glimpse. Our brains even provide us with specialized neural circuits and a range of fine-tuned regions, often completely outside of our conscious awareness, that rapidly detect and process nuanced cues such as facial expressions, tone of voice, and body language to identify and respond to the emotions of others.

Our human brains are creative and imaginative powerhouses, pulling inspiration from our lived experiences, emotions, and subjective perspectives to create or invent new things. We continually make novel connections between concepts and ideas or imagine scenarios that have no grounding in reality. This complex cognitive process fuels artistic expression, scientific breakthroughs, and the discovery of new tools and technology in a way that is unlike any machine. As author and journalist David Brooks beautifully wrote, the human mind “evolved to love and bond with others; to seek the kind of wisdom that is held in the body; to physically navigate within nature and avoid the dangers therein; to pursue goodness; to marvel at and create beauty; to seek and create meaning.” And it does it all using only the same amount of energy it takes to power a dim light bulb.

Yet, our human brains also carry flaws and limitations. All of us carry artifacts from our ancient ancestors that function poorly in our modern world.

Cognitive biases, which lead to discrimination and irrational judgments, originated as mental shortcuts to support the quick decision-making essential to basic survival in the resource-limited world of early Homo sapiens. Our brains are constantly awash in chemistry—continually fluctuating hormones and neurotransmitters—that can impact our cognitive performance and ability to make smart decisions. Fight-or-flight responses, helpful when facing lions, tigers, and bears, can be triggered by modern banalities such as a reckless driver cutting us off in traffic and lead to a cascade of physiological changes that impact our mental abilities. Stress, anxiety, inadequate nutrition, and sleep deprivation—unfortunately prevalent in our modern world—diminish our attention span and problem-solving abilities.

Each of us also carries a unique recipe of cognitive weaknesses. We’ve all been on our own individual and often lifelong journeys to discover strategies and approaches that work best for our unique cognitive profile. But no matter how much we’ve succeeded, we all have areas where we could benefit from a cognitive boost. Some of these challenges are small, but many are quite difficult to overcome. Executive functioning problems, such as difficulties with planning, organizing, and managing time are widespread. Diagnoses of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which can cause difficulties with attention and focus, are increasing. According to the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity, an estimated one in five Americans has dyslexia.

Despite these challenges and limitations, our remarkable human brains continue to adapt and evolve. And now, with the advent of a new era of AI, we have powerful new tools that can open up exciting possibilities to enhance our mental capabilities in ways we’re only beginning to explore.

AI Gives Us New Tools

Thinking with AI puts our human needs and dreams at the center. We’re still relying on the almost magical abilities of our extraordinary human brain to drive us forward. But we are leveraging the new machine capabilities to help us.

At the core are AI models, such as large language models (LLMs), which are mathematical systems trained on vast repositories of the world’s digital data—from written language to videos, images, and charts. A handful of tech giants and startups have built highly advanced “frontier” models, including LLMs like GPT. However, we’re also seeing new kinds of models emerge. These include smaller models that enable AI capabilities on your phone without network connectivity, and specialized models tailored to specific industries or functional domains.

We use software to implement and interact with these models in real-world applications. In fact, AI models are increasingly woven into our everyday software and digital experiences—you may have noticed options to write, create, search, or edit with AI popping up in your enterprise software or social media apps. But we can also access the capabilities of the most advanced models directly through chatbots provided by the companies that built them. ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, is one such chatbot. It offers access to OpenAI’s sophisticated GPT models through a simple interface that requires no technical knowledge.

Like our brains, AI models have limitations and flaws. To use AI effectively to enhance our thinking, we need to understand these limitations. I’ll explain these tradeoffs throughout this book so you can make informed decisions about when and how to use AI.

Unlock a New Possible with Machine + Human Intelligence

Thinking with AI means understanding how to bring machine and human intelligence together to achieve something that wasn’t possible before. We combine these two powerful forms of intelligence. Our natural brain functioning—what scholar Michael Ignatieff describes as “a distinctively, incorrigibly human activity that is a complex combination of conscious and unconscious, rational and intuitive, logical and emotional reflection . . . so complex that neither neurologists nor philosophers have found a way to model it”11—works alongside AI’s vast processing power to achieve what neither could do alone. It’s a collaboration with the potential to enhance our performance as individuals, teams, and entire organizations.

Recent research offers a glimpse into one facet of AI’s potential. A study of 100,000 people across eleven occupations in Denmark found that workers estimated that using ChatGPT could halve their working time for over thirty percent of their job tasks.12 However, the promise of AI extends far beyond the relatively mundane benefit of time savings. Those who master the art of collaborating with AI use the technology as a force multiplier for their human capability—to help them push the boundaries of what’s possible as a human. Here are some of the ways people with high AIQ can elevate their innate potential: