Cognitive friction can help people keep their skills sharp

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 5:16

   for the public but also apply them so i still feel like there's you know regardless of um how many discoveries ai is making there is this whole problem like one or two layers down of how does this actually get translated into physical discoveries and you know economic growth after that so what are your thoughts around that i mean it's a very multifaceted question um Science is obviously a complex set of societal structures and norms.

2. 5:46

   And now suddenly a new technology is entering this space, obviously helping accelerate it, but being disruptive in some ways. I think when it comes to this question, there is a short-term aspect of it and a long-term one. The short-term one is obviously what do we do today to make the most of it. The long-term one, which is equally interesting but harder to answer, and the entire community should come together to find a way of answering it, is how do we build or rather train and develop the next generation of human experts.

3. 6:20

   Especially because historically, at least, people would become experts by the virtue of doing science manually. So now that science is being somewhat identified, there is this question mark. And, you know, we've been facing the same question as developers because we used to write all of our code manually, which is obviously no longer the case. Agente coding is very much a thing nowadays. So we need to think about also sharpening our skills and staying sharp as we move along.

4. 6:53

   Because science is very much a human endeavor. And even if it gets accelerated with AI, is going to stay a human endeavor so we need to make sure that the human component of that whole setup remains uh yeah as it should yeah i'm curious as like a side point um if you have thought about this question of preserving um you know like our mental agility or making sure that you know we don't atrophy like intellectually um as ai gets more integrated into our lives Yes. I mean, it's a hard question.

5. 7:30

   Lots of ideas have been proposed as to how potentially to address it. One could approach it through some way of introducing cognitive friction to a process where maybe intentionally, every once in a while, AI is withheld and a person needs to make a judgment on their own. Maybe occasionally, if the workflow is amenable to that, there can be some follow-up questions like a mini quiz of sorts just thing that the person is switching on because as we've seen in other fields and the applications of AI over the years not even with agentic AI there are all sorts of known issues that may arise like for example automation bias which is when AI gets really good it's very easy to just click yes right and move along and people over time tend to do that sometimes also if the AI maybe is not as good or there is not that much trust sometimes people override its predictions

6. 8:31

   too much so it can go either way trusting it too much or mistrusting it too much and both of those failure modes lend themselves to suboptimal outcomes so finding the best of interacting with technology is just as important as building it and their whole fields like human computer interaction etc other communities that have been thinking about how best to present and integrate AI as it gets developed. So I think now that we are entering a world where agents are just very capable, we need to actually be doing more work of that sort to make sure that we can land it in everyone's hands in the best possible way. But yeah, I mean, it very much remains an open question on the best way to do that. And I think it depends on the use case in the domain.

7. 9:15

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