Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?
我们是否正在将过多的思考外包给人工智能？
Reflections on autonomy and the value of thinking for ourselves 关于自主权与独立思考价值的思考
I have been observing, in myself and in those around me, a tendency to increasingly offload our thinking to AI. From trivial decisions to complex thinking, it is easy, convenient, and in some cases, encouraged, to use AI for researching, reasoning, and answering our every query. 我一直在观察自己和周围的人，发现我们有一种趋势，即越来越多地将思考外包给人工智能。从琐碎的决定到复杂的思考，使用人工智能进行研究、推理和回答我们的每一个问题，既简单又方便，在某些情况下甚至是被鼓励的。
I recently read “The Perfect Match” by Ken Liu, a 2012 short story which describes this phenomenon with unexpected accuracy. In the story, a universal AI assistant named Tilly serves users by offering useful and enjoyable recommendations. The main character asks Tilly questions like “What do you recommend I do for breakfast this morning?” and defers to Tilly to find him a suitable person to go on a date with. The main character does not know what he wants to eat for breakfast, what music he would like to listen to, nor what to say on his date. “Who knows your tastes and moods better than I?” quips Tilly in an affectionate voice. 我最近读了刘宇昆（Ken Liu）2012 年的短篇小说《完美匹配》（The Perfect Match），它以出人意料的准确性描述了这一现象。在故事中，一个名为 Tilly 的通用人工智能助手通过提供有用且令人愉悦的建议来服务用户。主角会问 Tilly 诸如“你建议我今天早上吃什么早餐？”之类的问题，并听从 Tilly 的安排去寻找合适的约会对象。主角不知道自己早餐想吃什么，不知道想听什么音乐，也不知道约会时该说什么。“除了我，还有谁比我更了解你的品味和心情呢？”Tilly 用亲昵的声音打趣道。
My friend recently went to a San Francisco startup event, where he encountered a man with a small device pinned to his shirt. The device was a sleek little capsule of polished metal, no more than two fingers wide. My friend asked about the device, and the man said it was a microphone which he used to record all of his conversations. At the end of the day, Microphone Man would kick off a workflow to summarize and analyze all of the conversations. He said, with the enthusiasm of a tech bro unveiling his latest setup, “I think Claude Fable is smarter than me. It’s better at critical thinking than I am, so I let Fable do all of my thinking these days.” 我的朋友最近参加了旧金山的一场创业活动，在那里他遇到了一位在衬衫上别着小装置的男士。这个装置是一个光滑的抛光金属小胶囊，宽度不超过两根手指。我朋友询问了这个装置，那人说这是一个麦克风，他用它来记录所有的谈话。每天结束时，“麦克风男”会启动一个工作流来总结和分析所有的对话。他带着科技男展示最新装备时的那种热情说道：“我觉得 Claude Fable 比我聪明。它的批判性思维比我强，所以我现在让 Fable 代替我进行所有的思考。”
Before Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini became household names, we were already offloading parts of our thinking to search engines. But search still required us to break down a question, evaluate sources, and synthesize an answer. AI increasingly performs those intermediate steps for us, producing a finished response to even complex or esoteric questions in minutes. 在 Claude、ChatGPT 和 Gemini 成为家喻户晓的名字之前，我们其实就已经在将部分思考外包给搜索引擎了。但搜索仍然需要我们自己拆解问题、评估来源并综合答案。而人工智能正越来越多地为我们执行这些中间步骤，甚至能在几分钟内为复杂或深奥的问题提供现成的答案。
Tools like Google Deep Research and OpenAI Deep Research can now do work that might once have taken a single human being, minutes, hours, or days. It saves you time, and it saves you thinking. 像 Google Deep Research 和 OpenAI Deep Research 这样的工具，现在可以完成曾经需要一个人花费几分钟、几小时甚至几天才能完成的工作。它节省了你的时间，也省去了你的思考。
But it is a fine line between having an assistant that helps with your tasks, and losing all of your autonomy. Perhaps the question to ask is: who is making all of the final decisions for the things that really matter to you in your life? 但拥有一个协助你处理任务的助手，与失去所有自主权之间，只有一线之隔。也许我们应该问的问题是：在你生活中真正重要的事情上，究竟是谁在做最终决定？
In Ken Liu’s story, the main character believes that the algorithm knows him better than himself. He defers all decisions, as trivial as what to wear and as important as how to find love, to his assistant. The Microphone Man, similarly, defers all higher-level thinking to Claude, which he believes is smarter than he is in all respects. 在刘宇昆的故事中，主角认为算法比他自己更了解他。他将所有的决定——从穿什么衣服这样琐碎的事，到如何寻找爱情这样重要的大事——都交给了他的助手。同样，“麦克风男”也将所有高阶思考外包给了 Claude，他认为 Claude 在各方面都比他聪明。
The offloading of thinking to AI creeps into my life, too. There will always be some tradeoff between slow thinking and quick answers. Many questions merit quick answers. Many others, I think, would merit longer thinking. Maybe there is some value in our lives to forgetting the trivial, to not having an immediate answer to every query that appears in our minds. 将思考外包给人工智能的倾向也悄悄潜入了我的生活。在“慢思考”和“快答案”之间，总会存在某种权衡。许多问题值得快速回答，但我认为，还有许多问题值得更深入的思考。也许在我们的生活中，遗忘琐事、不对脑海中出现的每一个疑问都寻求即时答案，本身就具有某种价值。
A few months ago, I was traveling in Portugal with my sister. After walking around the Monument to the Discoveries, we got the feeling that Portugal seemed to idolize these “discoverers” and “explorers” whereas in the US, we would call them “conquerors” and “colonizers”. I asked our tour guide if Henry the Navigator or any of these men were cancelled, in the way that Christopher Columbus is very cancelled in the US. She responded that they were not, and in fact, men like Henry the Navigator were generally regarded as admired historical figures. 几个月前，我和姐姐在葡萄牙旅行。在参观完“发现者纪念碑”后，我们感觉到葡萄牙似乎将这些人奉为“发现者”和“探险家”，而在美国，我们可能会称他们为“征服者”和“殖民者”。我问导游，恩里克王子（Henry the Navigator）或这些历史人物是否像克里斯托弗·哥伦布在美国那样被“取消”了。她回答说并没有，事实上，像恩里克王子这样的人通常被视为受人尊敬的历史人物。
My sister wondered why Portugal seemed so proud of their colonial history and why their response to colonialism seemed so different from how the US currently talked about and treated its own history of colonialism. “Let’s ask ChatGPT,” she said, pulling out her phone. 我姐姐很纳闷，为什么葡萄牙似乎对他们的殖民历史感到如此自豪，以及为什么他们对殖民主义的反应与美国目前谈论和对待自身殖民历史的方式如此不同。“我们问问 ChatGPT 吧，”她说，并掏出了手机。
I suggested (with only a little bit of initial resistance) that we pause and think about why this might be. I suggested a few theories. Perhaps it was Portugal’s relative homogeneity and religiousness, compared to the US’s diversity of immigrants. Perhaps it was Portugal’s reliance on the “Age of Exploration” as a core cultural identity. 我建议（虽然最初有一点点抵触）我们停下来思考一下这背后的原因。我提出了几个理论：也许是因为葡萄牙相对单一的民族构成和宗教信仰，而美国则有着多元的移民背景；也许是因为葡萄牙将“大航海时代”作为其核心文化认同的支柱。