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Apple’s bleak sales pitch for embedding GenAI into iOS

I couldn’t agree more with this response from Gloria Mark:

Apple’s message is clear: this is the promise of AI—you can be your unfiltered, lazy self. Say whatever you want—AI will refine it for you, smoothing out the rough edges so you won’t get fired. The deeper message in the ad is that AI will reinterpret and align your values with the corporation’s. You won’t need to do the work to examine your inner core values—AI will convert them into something socially acceptable for the workplace.

Warren represents cognitive surrender. He’s not just using AI to fix his grammar; he is relinquishing his agency—it’s outsourced to the machine. His restlessness isn’t just a quirk—it’s a symptom of intellectual decay, and he doesn’t even realize it.

https://gloriamark.substack.com/p/outsourcing-our-minds?

The utopian vision of generative AI is that it reduces the amount of information that we need to process, freeing up attentional resources that we can use for other important things. Perhaps there will be less need for cognitive enhancement drugs like Adderall. But will we actually utilize this newfound mental bandwidth productively, given our propensity for laziness? Or will we rather become like Warren, the individual that Apple is selling us–a person whose mind has atrophied, passively watching and allowing AI to think for him?

It’s a slippery slope. Who can resist a machine that tirelessly works for us without making us feel the guilt of delegation? And when we do have free time, will we really pick up a copy of War and Peace or will we scroll on our smartphones or binge watch TV instead? Warren’s short attention span and his distractions are not just a quirk; it’s a warning.

The real danger as we outsource more of our mental effort to AI, is that we lose agency over our own cognitive abilities. AI is a technological breakthrough, but it’s altering the very way we think. We’re speeding forward in this new world of AI barely noticing how the landscape is shifting. While concerns about privacy, ethics, values, environmental impact, and job displacement have dominated discussions on AI, I’m struck by how we have not yet talked much about how it can affect our cognition.

https://gloriamark.substack.com/p/outsourcing-our-minds?
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