Forklift To The Gym

Writer Cal Newport made this analogy a while ago: Using AI to do your thinking for you is like taking a forklift to the gym.

It doesn't matter that a forklift is better than us at lifting heavy things. The entire point of lifting heavy things is to make us stronger. It's true that when we lift things in a work setting, we absolutely should use machines for help. The problem is just that we're losing something important in the process. Prior to the rise of the office job, nobody needed to designate special time to exercise. The job was the exercise. Then, in the course of the 20th century, doctors noticed that a lot of people were dying of heart attacks and realized that it was due to the new sedentary lifestyle. So now, people have to make time to run, bike, swim, or lift.

Will something similar happen with cognitive work? If we allow AI to do all the thinking for us—write that email, summarize that request, implement that bug fix—do we need to schedule gym time for the brain so it remains functional? And given how we're experts at skipping our workouts when we don't feel like doing them, will the same happen with our brain workouts?

That's one reason I don't write this newsletter with AI. It would mean skipping an important brain workout that helps me stay focused and in the thick of things. How easy it would have been to prompt Claude: "Hey, I need another newsletter article. Make it about taking a forklift to the gym. No em-dashes!"

And then I wouldn't have internalized what I'm trying to express.

Assistance is fine. Grammarly catches (most of the) funny mistakes that happen when I slice and dice and rearrange the sentences. Spell-check is great, too. Applied to other cognitive areas, let AI handle the mundane by all means, just make sure to stay in control of the high-level cognition.