Are we in charge of our AI tools or are they in charge of us?

23:48Part of it might be writing, a specific type of writing. Part of it might be specific types of research. Part of it might be specific types of public speaking. Each one of these will be different for us. And I am reasonably sure it's different for me today than it was like a year ago or 10 years ago, because like we change over time. So considering that one way that I think about it is less as like, hey, what do I want to hold off on before handing it over to an autonomous agent? And more that like, considering this autonomous agent exists, or I can make it exist, what can we do together? And if I get more confidence that it works well, then I hand off more.

24:24Just like, you know, if you have a really good PA and like you understand what he or she is really good at, then you might say like, okay, you take care of that. I'm great. I will do this other stuff. It's the same kind of dynamic that I find most useful.

24:37Azeem Azhar:And can I just add personal experience to that? So I've had so much more time in my space of generative, constitutive, constitutive, Nita says it so much better than me, competence. I spend much more time writing. I spend much more time reading. I write lots of my essays that go out on exponential view longhand first, and I read them out, then I get them transcribed. And it reminds me of this idea that these tools perhaps could give us more time, right? It was a concept that Eric first introduced to me a few years ago, that doctors would get time back in order to be better doctors. And I certainly feel in 2026, I'm doing more good thinking than I was four years ago when I was essentially battling with an inbox and Google searches.

25:22This is amazing. Azeem, you seem to spend part of your days in like 2100 and part of your days in like 1450. This is a beautiful, beautiful day here. Eric, do you agree with this framework? And what do you what do you consider your essential skills that you would never cognitively offload? Yeah, I do agree that it's very personal. the one cognitive skill like if I'm writing something whether it's a paper or a blog or whatever I feel like if I used AI to write it it would be cheating it isn't right to share with other humans if it's not my product it probably would be better if I had AI as a copy editor and making tweaks whatever but I just feel bad about that I just couldn't go there maybe I'll move into the 2100 with Azeem I don't know But otherwise, though, I do think it's changing.

26:13It's dynamic. You know, it's a very fluid thing and offloading things more and more, as Anita mentioned, you know, things that are just to make your life not just more automated, but much more practical. Getting time back. Getting time back in medicine is probably the greatest goal just because, as Azeem mentioned, it's squeezed so badly to try to care for patients. that if you can get rid of data clerk function and a lot of the mundane tasks, you can be a much better doctor and the patient-doctor relationship can get restored.

26:45Azeem Azhar:I am curious about one thing though, the one thing I struggle with, I really battle with is that I'm still moving at speed. And a lot of great thinking comes from attention. It comes from observation. It comes from chewing it over in your head in whatever mechanism you use. And many of the examples we've given are in the kind of practical day-to-day where there is a time constraint. You have to see this patient now, or you have to ship this for the client by then. But really, really great thinking has traditionally happened with attention and care and self-reflection. And I would also just, in the world that we live in, I don't think I get enough of that.

27:26Azeem Azhar:Yes, I'm doing a lot of pretty good quality thinking, but am I really doing the quality of thinking I could do if I had 10 days without an interruption? And what do I give up for that? So I want to say that there is a way to use AI for that too, though, right? And it's not just metacognition of reflecting on a particular issue. I came across this blog post somebody wrote where they described what they call their potato prompt. And I adopted it and put it into Claude for me. Their potato prompt is like, Whenever I type the word potato followed by an argument, I want you to tell me the three ways in which the argument I just made could fail, two counter arguments to the argument, and some other blind spot that I've missed.

28:10And I want you to be a hostile critic, like shed all of your niceties and be hostile. And the first couple of times I ran this, I was like, oh, my God, I'm going to shrink into a little hole and cry because it's so unkind to you and devastating. But it's made my thinking so much sharper that like every time I like throw up an argument and I'm like, oh, on self-reflection, that was a brilliant insight, Nina, right? And then like it's interrogating this prompt over and over and over again. And, you know, yes, I have the benefit of time as an academic to be able to sit around and do that with my potato prompts.

28:44You would bounce these ideas off of friends. I still bounce the ideas off of friends. I still turn to other humans and say, hey, can you peer review this and can you give me a reaction to it? But that instant real-time feedback to push your thinking is a way in which you can use AI to challenge you and to push you further rather than just to offload. Azim, can I go back to the blur that you started with? So you started with this very enticing point that we're in kind of a blurry stage right now. Like we clearly controlled these tools or we were manipulated a bit by Facebook a few years ago and there has been manipulation.

29:14But like we were mostly in control and now it's a blur. your brand is all exponential because these tools are improving exponentially aren't we basically cooked like don't we have like a very short window of time where there's a question of whether we're in control but a couple of years from now it will be all agentic manipulation of us all the time and like we'll have moments where we can disconnect and go into our cave and write with our pens but uh things are going to change very quickly what do you think of that well you

29:44Azeem Azhar:know, part of this comes from what Nita said much earlier on, which is that we are always making decisions within the constraints and frameworks of the things around us, many of which predate Facebook, believe it or not, you know, the advertising industry, the greasy pole in the corporate job and wanting to move out of the cubicle. So I think we're seeing something that we have previously seen before. There is a deep challenge in it, which is that the things that we've discussed today suggest that you can counter some of the negative force of AI, you know, the doctors who misdiagnose, or we can find ways of educating and training people, even though the junior ladder has closed.

30:23Azeem Azhar:But it does require a lot of self-knowledge. And the four of us, the five of us really are at the point where we do spend a lot of time introspecting, and we do work with these tools professionally. Do people really have that self-knowledge as a tool within themselves, but more widely. I'm not sure. And I'm not sure that schools, for example, have necessarily been set up to teach that. If the thing that you need is self-knowledge and a grip of meaning and a certain degree of self-confidence about where you do and don't have agency, I don't think any high school anywhere in the world has thought that that's so critical it needs to be taught.

31:03Actually, there's this wonderful German school that has trialed this mindfulness program, this breathing program. And then there's this huge program that is nationwide called Learning to Breathe. And what these programs are designed to do is to develop interoceptive skills in children. And what they've shown is that in doing that, it has a direct impact on things like math scores and other kinds of scores because the embodiment and learning to develop the grounding in oneself and the grounding in one's body and to develop those intuitions become very powerful ways of doing so. So there are some examples.

31:42I agree with you, it's not the norm, Azeem, but there are some wonderful examples that we can draw from and build from to start to recognize that in order to change our educational systems, to start to orient toward the felt capacities that are necessary to develop those kinds of intuitions, there are some that are working and that can be scaled. So in general, I disagree with the notion that like education can get us out of this. Educational systems were set up to do something fairly specific. And we try to push and prod them and to try and tell them like, hey, you need to teach the kids to do meditation better, or you need to teach the kids to how to use AI or how to use computers back in the day.

32:19The kids who learn how to use these tools better are primarily the ones who just spent a bunch of time and try to do stuff with it. That was true of the internet. That was true of mobile. That's true of computers and programming in general, as opposed to saying, here's a structured course whereby you actually use it. And specifically with AI, I think it's exacerbated because ultimately it is the easiest thing in the world to use because you open up something and you type something in and you get something back. Like my eight-year-old accidentally discovered Canva has an AI, which I didn't know.

32:52So he discovered it and he's been making little website stuff for himself based on dinosaurs and different things that he cares about. Nobody needs to tell him because it's a text box, right? He knows how to type stuff in and he can actually respond back and forth with it. I feel like that's going to get blown up. I mean, that is the thing that is required. We need a lot more whimsy and we need people to actually play around a lot more, which is probably not something that an education system can solve. Maybe we can solve it individually, but I don't see that there is a systemic solution to any of this.

33:25Maybe just one more point. Sorry, go ahead. Can I just ask you and push back on that for a minute, which is the example I was giving was not education in the way you were just describing it, right? So it was not education about like how to use the tools better or anything like that. It's recognizing that our educational systems primarily have focused on output rather than how do you build like kind of core competencies in individuals. And the reason that I think the breathing program is not about education traditionally, it is recognizing that there is something eroding in human capacity for thinking.

33:58And if we, instead of focusing on output, focus on some of those constituent elements like embodiments and how to actually develop intuition, for example, how you use tools comes later, but whether or not you develop those kind of core capacities for thinking is something that the educational system could do better. And I'm just I'm wondering if you think that that's possible.

34:21Azeem Azhar:I'll be the relentless optimist on that point, because we've not even tried to do that in a consistent, coherent way over the last 30 or 40 years, which is why we see, you know, in the professional services, you know, lawyers who have terrible patterns of how they interact with their clients. And of course, the bedside manner of doctors varies enormously from the ones who you like to the ones who just freak you out. And we've got here without paying any attention to those types of values or skills or how to cultivate them. And perhaps now we'll be forced to because of the nature of this technology.

34:58Azeem Azhar:But it seems like it's more of an opportunity than a deep, deep problem. Eric, when you look at people going into the medical profession and you look at the skills they need for a future in which AI will be ever present and everywhere, do you think we're training them the right way? What do we need to do differently? Oh, we're definitely training them the wrong way. They're first selected by their test performance scores. AI can do better on that anyway. And their grade point average. And they're not for their interpersonal communication skills. That's a problem. And then as far as the training per se, there isn't one medical school out of 160 now in the US.

35:37It's actually has AI in the core curriculum. So it's almost like it doesn't exist. It's like in a denial state. So whether it's the selection or whether it's the education, we haven't even acknowledged that it's the transformation of medicine in the future.

35:53Azeem Azhar:Eric, to what extent with a doctor today are we looking for that high reliability to the differential diagnosis, which is actually a kind of mechanistic algorithmic thing, right? Then mechanistic algorithmic things are what machines do better than people. So we've needed to do that because the knowledge was really scarce. So it's hard to get that knowledge into an intelligence, into a human skull. And maybe now what we're able to do, because that knowledge can be offloaded, is develop the other part that delivers patient outcomes, which is about, you know, this kind of constitutive awareness, this embodied understanding of what it is to be a person and a person in the world.

36:37Yeah, absolutely. I think the diagnosis accuracy will be one of the really big jumps that we'll see because of what you're saying, Azim. We already have some good indicators of that, but it's relying on the right way to deploy AI, which we've already mentioned has some of its issues at the moment. But eventually, I do think that's absolutely going to be how this plays out. Accuracy is going to be one of the greatest gifts of AI in medicine for that reason. I want to ask a big question of the group. So we all seem to agree. We're all pretty optimistic about AI benefiting us, AI benefiting our fields, different degrees.

37:17And we're all intensely aware and reasonably concerned about this descaling, offloading process. We're about to enter a stage where AI is going to become much, much more powerful. What is the thing you're looking for? Like, what is the bad thing that could happen or the good thing that could happen that will put us on a better track with our relationship with AI? What is something that either will go this way or that way in the next year, but we're not sure about? Eric said that he feels like he's cheating if he puts something into the world that AI has written. And that's the tipping point that I'm actually looking at, which is we've been talking a lot about like selves, the building of selves, the capacity of selves.

37:59What that ignores is that we exist within an ecosystem of information, of content, of things that are produced. Like think about that as like the corpus of human knowledge that is out there that we draw from. And the more that becomes synthetic and AI output or slopification or and shitification or however people are describing it, right? The less there is like felt human experience and the things that are out there. I'm worried about that the things we're ingesting start to erode us in other different ways. And so the kind of tipping point that I'm looking for is, you know, there are people who are out there trying to track like how much of the content on the internet is now produced by AI, how much of it is produced by humans, how much of like the corpus of what we're drawing from is human and how much of the corpus of what we're drawing from is no longer human.

38:51And what's the impact of that on our ability to think? Eric was thinking about it from the kind of perspective of contributing to that corpus and that he feels like he's wronging us all if he does something that contributes to it that's not fully human. Most people don't feel that way. And so what we have out there is a lot of non-human content. And we have no idea what the impact of that is on like brain rot of kids or anything else like that. So I'm looking for that tipping point of like both what happens. And there's some really interesting early studies that are looking at like how do humans react to AI created music versus non-AI created music?

39:30What is their emotional response to art that is created? What's the impact of labeling of that information? Can they tell the difference or not? I think it's going to be a lot harder to track and more subtle than that to actually understand what that does to us.

39:43Azeem Azhar:There was a moment in the atomic weapons race when you can actually measure when it started in geological or atmospheric measurements because there's not a certain amount of radioisotope before and then there is afterwards. And I think that there is this moment that we'll start to see as more of us get exposed to text that is written by AI. That's what we will see as text and start to follow up. And if you're still on X now, what you will see is a very large number of these essays that appear on X. They're no longer 288 characters long. And they're being produced at a rate of knots by very busy people who aren't writers.

40:23Azeem Azhar:And of course, I'm reading them because there are insights and there's data and there's analysis and argument in there. So you then get exposed to that. And I am quite curious whether that is sort of what Nita is identifying, which is what looks good in our mind starts to change because what we're being exposed to constantly and you know perhaps that's how our learning process will work and we won't notice it's happened but what if the ai gets good and the ai slot becomes better than what the humans put out right like what if the average writing quality of twitter is higher in 2028 than it was in 2023 yeah it's not it's not about whether it's better or worse though right like the reason eric feels like he's cheating to put it out into the world isn't because like he recognizes it might be better in terms of copy editing.

41:10Like it might be more precise and grammar. It might even sound better and people might even react to it better. And that's in fact what the science shows is that people react to AI generated information more positively. But there is something subtle to Azim's point about like when it shifts, we don't know what that does to what it means to be human. We don't know what it does to have information that is not created by felt and bodied humans that we're feeding on. How that subtly changes us. Yeah, you described it better than I could. Thank you, Nita. I may just add that like the average quality of X-post is higher with AI slop today already than it was in 2023.

41:50But what we are realizing collectively is that despite the average quality being higher, like Nita said, people dislike it a lot more. There are people who kind of still push it. I use Pangrim quite a lot to detect sort of AI slop under. It's everywhere. It's not just in Twitter, right? I mean, like journalists, like a lot of articles that are getting published are basically AI slop to sort of some extent. And I think slop here is an important word because primarily what we're saying is that it has all the appearance of a fulfilling meal, but it has no calories. It's kind of empty. I call it hollow wear.

42:24It might have a couple of points in it there. It is fairly hollow. And to me, that is an example of AI doing something really badly. If it can't write a really good article just yet, but the things that it can do really well, like create the apps that Azeem uses every day, for example, or that I use, that is a functionality, that is a capability addition to me. Whereas if I got AI to write one of my articles and then I had to rewrite it, that's a whole lot more work.

42:52Azeem Azhar:Yeah, and I would say that it also tells us something about how mechanised, how much through Adam Smith's division of labour, a lot of the production of words has become. Because many things like certain types of research reports, even certain types of academic papers, let alone the text on many marketing websites, are essentially produced by algorithms that were being carried out by humans. a bit like the female computers, calculators during the early days of NASA, right? Executing an algorithm that we now hand over to a computer. But the real, you know, for those of us who are writers, the real writing happens somewhere else.

43:31Azeem Azhar:And it's extremely difficult. I mean, all my efforts to build an AI-enabled style guide. I'm sure The Atlantic has a style guide. Many newspapers have a style guide. I wanted a style guide that used AI tools to help people adhere to the way I write across my surfaces. It simply cannot replicate what I do, except in certain trivial ways, like the fact that I prefer Germanic roots to English words than Latin roots, the fact that I write 91 % active sentences, and I vary my sentence length in paragraphs. You know, those are very, very surface, because what's missing is what pops out of me and my embodied and lived experience.

44:11Azeem Azhar:And I guess that the challenge that we might face is that as these tools become pervasive, and many of the experiences we get, whether it's on Netflix or TikTok, or frankly, the products that are in the shops, are mediated through those tools, my experience is going to be that much more blunted, and therefore much more aligned with what an external set of AI systems are doing, than what I might have done had I experienced them a little bit more raw. Nita, can you explain a little more what you think might happen when we cross this point where the majority of information we take in was created by AI or when 90 % of the information we take in was created by AI?

44:51Nothing from the Atlantic, but of all the information outside of the Atlantic. Is that true still, Nick? Nothing from the Atlantic? Certainly, we have a rule against it. The same rule I had with my book, which is not one word written by AI. I used it constantly as a tool to help me think through things and to analyze transcripts and to measure the chronology, but not one word. And that's the rule at The Atlantic. Now, whether a writer has ever written a word, I don't know. But certainly we care a lot about it, in part just because we want to hold this line for brand identity. Right. Like we were founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

45:21Like you can't be founded by humanists and then have AI write your essays. So I mean, I've been looking at this and kind of all the studies that are out there so far and in particular trying to look at meaning making for humans. And, you know, it was interesting to hear Eric's reflection, because I think the impact will be more on the contributor than on the receiver for what the impact will be for humans, which is your contribution to humanity, to that corpus of knowledge, it turns out, is part of like the act of becoming like the brain needs that act like through architecture in the brain that we can get into if you want to.

46:01But like the act of contributing itself is the act of meaning making. And when it gets replaced by AI that does it, you don't experience that same effect. And so kind of meaning and purpose for the contributor looks very different. The receiver right now doesn't seem to experience it that differently because if it's not labeled as such, sometimes you can feel the hollowness, but sometimes you can't. Sometimes it looks identical. And increasingly, as humans start to write more like AI, you might not feel the difference. But sometimes you can. I think it'll be more pronounced for each of us individually contributing than it will be necessarily for the receipt.

46:40Azeem Azhar:I disagree with that perspective. And because that idea that you're not contributing, if you do that. Oh, I'm not saying you're not contributing. I'm not at all saying that. And in fact, like, I think you can inject humanity using AI tools. if what you're doing is saying, like, I am working iteratively with AI to bring my voice and my human and lived experience, but I'm using this as a vehicle to channel that. I think that's different than the wall of text that somebody posts, like they get to a LinkedIn post, and then they generate a response and don't even think or put themselves in it. There's a qualitative difference.

47:13There's a qualitative difference.

47:15Azeem Azhar:But you know, when I build something for my team, I'll give you an example of something I built today. So I've written millions of words. And what I wanted to do was take out our house view. Like, what do I believe about certain things? And essentially, I had the AI run across all these words to fill at a concept level. What are the 10 or 12 beliefs I've had and how they shifted over time? And I was then given something that I personally reviewed and then shared with the team. The bulk of that work, the human work that I spent an hour and a half would have been a thousand hours. So I did less than 0.1%, 0.2 % of the work, but I still had the sense that I was gifting something that was useful and usable and also distinctly distinctly me one of the most influential books for me in life is the book flowers for algernon um and I read it way too early I was in like second grade when I read it and you know crying as I'm reading it not you know I have no clue I'm a seven or eight years old at that point now I I look into the history of it and it is fascinating it took him 14 years to write it um and it started as a medical student.

48:21Later, he has an encounter with somebody who, in fact, has intellectual challenges and wants to be in kind of special education. There's all of these felt experiences that go into his writing of this book. Is that different that he brought 14 years of experience and iteration into it than the hour and a half you spent instead of the hundreds of hours that you spent in both what you experience and what I experience as the reader from what you bring to the table? It may be, we don't know, right? And that's what's changing. We have to acknowledge that there is something qualitatively different that has happened in the 14 years of writing that book, maybe, and what impact it has on me and what impact it has on him and the act of becoming than the hour and a half you took to boil down your thoughts.

49:09Rohit, it seems like you want to respond. We just have two minutes left. So both respond, deflect, destroy, augment, and help us sum up? Oh, I'll be very quick. All I would say is like, I think anytime AI gets good enough, we start seeing it as a tool because it becomes dependable. When it's not good enough, or when it's at the edge, we start looking at it as a destruction of some intrinsic humanity that we hold ourselves very dearly to. We have done it in every field so far, whether it's in like radiology, finance, supply chain, whatever. So art is a rather unique human endeavor. I don't want to start upon it as the kind of first thing that will go.

49:50I don't think that's true. But whenever it gets good enough to actually do a piece of work that we ourselves wanted to do, but now we can depend on us to do it, we have generally been pretty happy to hand it off and then say, we now know what this little box will do. Let it go do it while I go do other things and maybe write way more books like Flowers for Algernon. You know, it's a little bit like Quebec and the rest of Canada, that you have to have deliberate intent to preserve your language. Otherwise, it's crowded out by AI. If we don't have deliberate intent to keep AI as a tool, which is where I think it belongs, we'll lose a part of humanity, which is essential.

50:31Azeem Azhar:There is so much in here. And I want to just pick up on what Eric described, which is that deliberate intent, that deliberate intent about our own capabilities, that deliberate intent that these things are tools. And however we interrogate them, however we anthropomorphize them, they ultimately still are tools and should stay as such. You know, today's question is about the ongoing process of self-reflection. The deliberate intent is so important that understanding how to maintain the self is really, really important. I opened the session by saying that together we can see what none of us can see alone.

51:09Azeem Azhar:And I really think that with Nick's help, we've just proved that. So that's been the first of AI vistas or perhaps AI vistas. I have to figure out how I'm going to pronounce that. I don't know where the vistas came from. It just snuck in. It won't be the last one. We'll be back with a new question with new people in the room, same premise, real experience, different viewpoints and the view that you can only get when we all meet together. Now, if something landed for you today, you'll be able to send the output of all of this to someone who needs to hear it. We're also going to turn today's exchange into a written synthesis and a video on YouTube.

51:47Azeem Azhar:Now, if you're not already subscribed to Exponential View, this is a great moment, exponentialview.co, and I also recommend that you follow Eric, Nita and Rohit on Substack. And Nick, of course, buy The Atlantic a subscription as soon as you can. Thank you, everyone, and have a wonderful weekend. Thanks for listening all the way to the end. If you want to know when the next conversation is released, just hit subscribe wherever you're listening. That's all for now, and I'll catch you next time.