There are at least three big ways AI is going to change human thinking.
– AI is changing how we work
– AI is changing what average means
– AI is changing creativity
In each case humans are going to have to THINK WITH AI.
This has profound implications for education and I am exploring the implications for curriculum, policies, assignments and assessments in a new keynote and workshop on teaching with AI that I am giving a lot starting next month (and soon in a new book).
More on this to come, but start with the idea that AI is going to change our relationship with thinking, and in unexpected ways.
There is a new field of AI-Medicated Communication (AI-MC) that finds that when AI listens and offers “conversational assistance” it improves both patient/customer/client outcomes and perceptions of satisfaction (5 different research studies below all with similar conclusions from different arenas).
In all cases human interactions are improved with AI support–we can think better with AI. As one researcher put it:
“It’s like Grammerly for empathy.”
•Online Counseling
Hsu, S., Shah, R.S., Senthil, P., et al. (2023). Helping the Helper: Supporting Peer Counselors via AI-Empowered Practice and Feedback. ArXiv, abs/2305.08982.
• Customer Assistance
Brynjolfsson, E., Li, D., & Raymond, L. (2023, April). Generative Ai at Work NBER Working Paper No. w31161.
•Peer Support (19% increase in perceived empathy)
Sharma, A., Lin, I.W., Miner, A.S. et al. (2023) Human–AI collaboration enables more empathic conversations in text-based peer-to-peer mental health support. Nat Mach Intell 5, 46–57.
•Detection of Distress in Healthcare
Morrow, E., Zidaru, T., Ross, F., et al. (2023). Artificial intelligence technologies and compassion in healthcare: A systematic scoping review. Frontiers in psychology, 13, 971044.
•Consolation of Pet Loss (even when told directly by AI)
Liu, Y., Mittal, A., Yang, D. & Bruckman, Amy. (2022). Will AI Console Me when I Lose my Pet? Understanding Perceptions of AI-Mediated Email Writing. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 1-13.
I can see a new relationship app coming soon…