Which Human Capacities Is AI Growing in You?
It's all over the news, and I hear it from fellow soulpreneurs too:
"AI is seductive. Every time we let it think for us, or do things for us, we skip the effort that used to strengthen and grow our capacities. Little by little, we remember less… and think less… until our abilities have shriveled… and we might not even notice."
There’s an MIT study where people writing essays with ChatGPT leaned on it more with each essay, and had trouble quoting what they had written just minutes earlier.
I do worry about it. Yet, I also notice that the worry assumes we all know which capacities are being lost. Memory? Writing? Patience? Thinking itself? Usually, nobody clarifies.
Secondly, we don’t tend to ask the follow-up question… which (new) capacities are we developing?
If working with AI is diminishing some capacities, why wouldn’t it also be growing other abilities too?
By reading the starting list below, I hope that you'll recognize some of them in yourself, and add others for consideration.
Yes, some capacities do weaken…
I think the biggest one I’ve lost is patience: for administrative work, for writing painfully by hand.
But, what replaced that patience? More time creating deeper posts, and more posts.
Tools have always traded one capacity for another. 2,000 years ago, in Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates tells of an Egyptian king who warned that writing "will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories."
So true. How many of us are able to recite long poems from memory? Almost no one.
Yet, I don’t think anyone today would give up their ability to write… in order to recover the long verbal memory that humans used to have.
In August, in my letter to friends who are feeling uneasy about AI, I wrote that we cannot yet imagine the capacities we're growing.
Now, after a couple more months of working with AI nearly every day, I can already see some of these new and strengthened capacities…
A starting list of what's growing in us:
- Knowing what we actually want. AI can only help us, when we can describe what we're aiming for. So, every request is a little practice in getting clear about our vision, our goals, our taste. As I wrote in my post about aligning AI with conscious values, when I am forced to articulate my values clearly, the one who benefits most is myself.
- Taste and discernment. More and more, our job is to look at what AI made and judge whether it’s any good, and whether it sounds like us. As I said in a recent video, we're "basically now sitting back and learning to be good critics." That critic's eye gets sharper with use. And every round of feedback teaches our AI our taste, too!
- Checking the work at a higher level. We spend less effort on each small step, and more on checking that the finished piece is true and serves the person it's for. Even the researchers who surveyed knowledge workers about critical thinking found that, with AI, critical thinking shifts toward verifying information and stewarding the task. As AI gets smarter, I believe we'll verify its outputs at higher and higher levels. We are being asked to think more systemically.
- Directing and delegating. Many of us soulpreneurs never had a team, so we never learned to hand work off. Now we, who use AI agents, are practicing delegating every day. In You Can Now Stop Doing the Boring Admin Work I shared that AI saves me at least 15 hours of work every week. Learning to delegate well is what made those hours possible.
- Making what we never had the skills to make. I don't know how to make music videos… I never had the skill. Yet now I make them by directing my AI assistant (from my old content, no less!). What grows here is our ambition and agency: the willingness to start projects that are beyond our skills, and the stamina to see an idea all the way through.
- Holding more viewpoints than our own. Partnering with AI, I'm able to research much more deeply, and to hold more viewpoints. For this very post, my AI found the strongest research behind the premise.
- Seeing our own patterns. How we treat our AI can become a mirror. In that same post on conscious values, I noticed that "when I catch myself being extractive or demanding, I am becoming more aware of dominance patterns within myself." And when I practice courtesy with AI, I'm rehearsing courtesy.
What about the capacities we want to keep?
Some capacities are worth keeping strong on our own, even when AI could handle them. For those, I think the answer is to practice them on purpose.
As I put it on X recently: "Just like there are gyms for the body there will be gyms for the mind. Better yet, groups for accountability & camaraderie while practicing human skills & experiences."
Yes, there will be businesses and jobs in the (near) future that are focused on mental/spiritual gyms to help humans retain and strengthen our most uniquely human capacities!
Also, thinking first (before using AI) helps a lot. In that same MIT study, the people who wrote on their own first, and then brought in AI, showed more brain connectivity than the AI-only group had in its first three sessions.
One "gym" practice I've shared is the Daily Idea List… writing 10 ideas a day, on your own, to keep your idea muscle fit.
We get to choose which capacities we keep exercising… and which ones we hand to AI, while new ones grow.
Your turn…
My list is only a start. So I invite you to reflect:
What capacities have grown in you since you started working with AI?
Please share yours in the comments, and let's grow this list together. Thank you 🙏🏼🧡
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