How to stop AI from frying your brain

We all know that AI will eventually surpass human intelligence, but what if that’s less about AI getting smarter and more about us getting dumber? Imagine that your government bans all LLMs from tomorrow. You think that you could still write that Python script yourself or come up with that great idea for your team outing, but how sure are you really? Many of us have a sinking feeling that the more we’re outsourcing to AI, the more we’re losing the ability to think critically and to come up with truly innovative ideas. This talk explores the extent to which this sinking feeling is supported by scientific evidence. Given the novelty of agentic AI, we start by looking at historical research on the longer-term effects of other technologies such as GPS and Google, before diving into the emerging evidence on agentic AI and its effects on creativity, critical thinking and persistence. Pulling all of this together, I will discuss evidence-based strategies on when to use AI and when to resist its temptation altogether and pick up pen and paper - or a Jupyter Notebook - instead, so that if AI does eventually surpass us, it's on its own merits, not ours