24 October

Dear friends,

This week helped me to think about thinking. 
On Monday, I had the wonderful opportunity to attend an event on AI’s impact in primary education. The renowned educator and researcher Timothy Cook (not the guy from Apple) was the presenter. His research reveals a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities. He started the conversation by telling us about zebra mussels. A strange place to start a conversation on AI, I thought. Zebra mussels, as he explained, are a nuisance where he used to live in New York, just as they are in Amsterdam. You might have passed a canal where someone tries tirelessly to scrape them off the hull of a boat. These mussels are not bad in themselves. In fact, they are excellent water filters. An adult zebra mussel can filter 1 to 10 litres of water per day, removing massive amounts of phytoplankton. They are so good at their job that they make it very hard for other consumers to enjoy their share of plankton. The result is that they heavily disrupt freshwater ecosystems by acting as hyper-efficient filter feeders. Cook was questioning whether we shouldn’t think about AI in the same way – as hyper-efficient in one task, but destructive to the ecosystem around it. 

When using AI, we are trading mental effort for convenience, and – as Cook said elsewhere – our brains are adapting in alarming ways. What happens to a mind when it outsources its task to a hyper-efficient computer is that its muscles weaken. This act of “cognitive offloading” has long-term effects on critical thinking. Generative AI is quite different from search engines in this regard. Where your typical search engine, like Google, allows for collaborative thinking, GenAI allows for hyper-efficiency through passive consumption of machine-generated thought.

In another lecture I attended this week at the Global Network for Public Theology, a researcher asked whether we, in this age of AI, shouldn’t think again about thinking. If we regard what large language models are doing as thinking, he argued, we might be missing the point. In fact, he argued that this way of thinking had been plaguing us long before the routine use of AI. Thinking is not simply gathering information or facts – even when that information is efficiently gathered in large amounts. Drawing from Hannah Arendt, he argued that to be human and to think is not about yielding practical recipes, technical knowledge, or tangible solutions. Thinking is not about mere production. Instead, the value of thinking lies in the activity itself and the orientation it gives to our whole lives. For Arendt, this was not the kind of thinking that isolates us from the world. Instead, it is active thinking which constantly engages us with what is happening in the world around us. It is the ability to think responsibly. It is exactly when we are engaged in active thinking, rather than in aimless and involuntary thinking, that we reorient our lives. The opposite is perhaps the person who stops thinking. Arendt famously met Adolf Eichmann, who helped bring the Holocaust about. As Shai Tubali writes, “While she, like everyone else, was prepared to meet an inhuman monster, she was shocked to realize that there was really nothing there. Indeed, she concluded, it was the absence, the vacant space, the lack of thought, which had enabled Eichmann’s evil. His evil seemed to lack all depth into which one could delve and explore.” 

How can we, as a church, help one another to think? How can we avoid, as the saying goes, committing intellectual suicide when we enter church? How can we support one another in cultivating an intellectually responsible spirituality? Perhaps these are fitting questions as we approach Reformation Sunday, given that our faith tradition has always held thinking in high regard.

Marius