Is AI a Cognitive Trojan Horse?

It is obvious to us that the way most humans use AI greatly accelerates their own brainrot. The situation is dire.

We have warned about this extensively in videos like this.

Read the whole piece.

But what if you throw a technology into the mix that upsets the status quo — a metaphorical brand new virus that we haven’t had the chance to adapt to?

This is where we potentially face what’s often referred to as an evolutionary mismatch — a situation where a new technology transcends our evolved abilities to safely and successfully navigate its potential impacts.

Because we are a technological species, and have been for millennia, such mismatches are actually quite commonplace. Well known examples include mismatches between evolved risk responses and how we instinctively respond to technologies such as synthetic chemicals, vaccines, and pretty much anything that’s new and novel.

Yet — and this is part of our superpower as humans — we are remarkably good at using our cognitive abilities and intelligence to compensate and adapt to such mismatches, despite having not evolved with risks directly associated with many of technologies we encounter in our lives.

But what if the mismatch impacts the very cognitive abilities we rely on to navigate differences between what we experience, and what we’ve evolved to live with?

In effect, what if a new technology — and AI specifically in this case — does not trigger our epistemic vigilance mechanisms in the same ways that human-human communication does, and as a result has the ability to slip past our defenses undetected?

This is not mere speculation. While new research is absolutely needed into the potential for AI to act as a cognitive trojan horse by bypassing our epistemic vigilance mechanisms, there are sufficient indicators from associated areas of research that suggest a number of mechanisms by which this might occur.

These include (but are not limited to) processing fluency (our tendency to trust information that is delivered with a high degree of fluency), the role of “attractiveness” in communication (our willingness to trust a source of information that intrinsically appeal to us on multiple levels), speed and volume of information flow (where excessively high rates of information flow potentially overwhelms epistemic vigilance mechanisms), and what might be termed the “Intelligent User Trap” (where a smart user “knows” they are clever enough not to be fooled).