AI as a critical thinking tool

Here is the kind of AI product framing we sometimes get from Big Tech, their VCs and supporters: someone uses AI through a deeply human moment (grief, illness, loss) and finds unexpected comfort in it. The moral is always the same: the best products are the ones people rely on when everything else breaks. We are supposed to see the positive effects when someone has a strong emotional connection with a product that can “help” in difficult (also personal) situations.

We got similar lingo from the “social” media industry in its earlier days, but nobody believes in that anymore. Why should we now believe it when it’s about AI? In the case of social media it led to an attention crisis, loneliness and then fear and anger in large part of the population. I am not saying that social media is the only or even main reason for societal developments we see, but definitely a catalyst.

I think we can still do better. Why not use AI as a critical thinking tool that empowers people to actually consciously decide if they want to use it to manage emotions, translate hyper-professional lingo, write their newsletter or any combination of those? Like a new kind of enlightenment movement in which already young humans are educated into understanding more of the context of AI, who builds it and why?

And why not build AI tools that support human collaboration and aim for healthier relationships and more thoughtful self-determination?

I know there is no easy solution. Looking back I found that my critical thinking was mainly trained in extensive discussions about current society topics during school or in off-school youth groups. I am not sure if this still happens a lot, but one option can be to embed AI and its context deeper into the school curriculum. The context is of course bigger than technology and involves politics and economical interests. We can even include now the history of social media and what we learned from it. I find that humans, even younger, always react well on new insights on these topics. The goal will be to foster intellectual curiousity in human exchange. I even think AI can help with that. And for adults let’s build products as human tools in its original sense and make their internal and external workings as transparent as possible, because we have an educated audience.