How many times have you heard that the human brain is like a muscle? It's true, the less you use it, the weaker it gets.
And one PhD specializing in brain activity says that's going to be a danger as we enter the age of artificial intelligence.
Neuroscientist Dr. Patrick Porter says the temptation will be strong to let AI do our work for us, when all we should really do is allow AI to be a really great assistant, but its answers to questions are suspect.
A sad and dangerous misconception some people will have, though, is that AI will have definitive answers based on a wealth of sources. That's not true, at least so far.
"I think AI can be used as a research tool, but you still have to verify the information because it's just a glorified Google search engine, that returns information based on the wording of your prompt," he says.
Recent studies are showing AI with a great potential for doing the busy work most people face each day, allowing people to concentrate on the larger and more productive work, but a recent MIT study indicates that AI use of chatbots can lead to "lazy, shallow thinking which sidetracks a necessity to develop intellectually probing minds."
In another study, Dr. Porter says, researchers "let one group of students just use AI and the other set of students were just on their own. When they went back and checked on their, what's called neuro-plasticity, it means neuron connections in the brain -- the group that used AI actually lost those neural connections," Dr. Porter noted.
Another trap that people can be expected to fall into is allowing the AI to slowly take on more portions of a person's job. That will allow AI to start acting independently, keeping details of the work to itself.
There will eventually come a point, depending on the form of AI used, in which the AI will know more details about the work than will the worker.
"It's like taking a copying machine and copying the papers, but you didn't look at them, so you didn't process them through your neural network, so there's no place to retrieve them," Porters adds.
Using AI sparingly is one answer but using it strategically as part of work is a better answer.