Hello, welcome.
This is a space where I write about the things that interest me, take up a lot of my time, or topics I feel well positioned to provide my point of view on.
I started this blog after reading a study from the MIT Media Lab describing a potential correlation between cognitive decline and the amount of time you spend using large language models.
After further research, these findings (not yet peer-reviewed) received some negative backlash for the size of the sample and the duration of the study. Regardless, I found it equally interesting and concerning.
This is mainly because it helped confirm something I had long suspected. With every year that passes, we are offloading more and more of our cognitive functions to machines, applications, and algorithms.
I believe this started with smartphones. By introducing the ability to receive instant answers to our questions in real-time, our brains have been conditioned to remember less and less. This could certainly be considered pseudo bro-science, but in my view the logic is clear.
The brain is a muscle. Muscles need to be exercised to remain high-performant. Memorizing things is a great way to exercise this muscle. With immediate access to search engines, appointment reminders, save-the-dates, and conversation history - our brains know it is okay to remember less and less of the information we consume. In some ways, the human memory function is being offloaded to the cloud.
Social media is the next iteration of technology to take a toll on cognitive function. The rise of short form content and algorithms that feed us a continuous stream of new-to-us content have hijacked our reward system and nerfed our attention span.
This is self-evident in everyday life.
Why talk to a stranger on the train when your friend is on your phone? Why take a chance on a 300 page book when you can tune into an algorithm optimized to your top interests? Why pay attention to a boring presenter when the literal funniest people on earth are a scroll away?
And now we have artificial intelligence.
I am a big proponent of AI usage and plan to write more about it on this site, but after a few years of daily use, it is clear there are some cautions.
One of the key use cases for large language models is augmenting creative tasks. Even if the preliminary output is unreliable, these tools largely reduce the creative muscles required to get from zero to one. Instead, users prompt their LLM, receive an output, and spend significantly less time manually refining it - if at all.
This is great for productivity, but at what cost? Removing the 0-1 creation process feels like it is drastically reducing creativity and in some cases critical thinking skills, or at least reframing them to think only in terms of what AI is capable of producing - which is equally scary.
So here we are.
The goal of this blog is to try and counter some of the negative effects of living in a digital world. By taking time to sit with my thoughts, give my entire focus to a single (entirely optional) task, and find creative ways to tell a story, prove a point, or educate whoever reads this, I am hoping to reclaim some lost brain cells as a result of spamming Claude for every task that comes my way.
I hope you enjoy. Read more of my writing here.