Brain extensions

If hair extensions can give you the hairstyle you covet, what might brain extensions do for you? Help you remember a phone number or help you write an entire book? Would you be offloading information, like your grocery list, or outsourcing the creation of the list in the first place? 

Welcome to the latest round of arguments over how we use AI. As a seventy‑something writer, I’m fascinated at what my own ‘brain extensions’ can and cannot do for me.

All of this began swirling around in my mind after a coffee date with a much younger friend and former colleague. For years, she’d been the one dragging me into each new digital era. She taught me how to use various work platforms, social media dashboards, and whatever other shiny tool our communications work demanded, while I kicked and screamed my way through it all. She was the savvy digital native. I was the dinosaur.

So I was amused, and a bit surprised, when our roles suddenly flipped after the topic turned to AI. I asked her how she was using AI these days. She hesitated before telling me she was treading lightly, deeply worried about what AI might do to her ‘agency’ as both writer and human being. 

The more she talked, the more she sounded like the Baby Boomer in the conversation while I was bubbling over like a Millennial with a new app, explaining how I was happily handing over all sorts of editing tasks to my AI assistant.

That conversation stuck with me. Was I, in fact, only offloading to AI, or was I starting to outsource my thinking too?

By ‘offloading’, I mean giving a system information or tasks to hold and manage for me, like a digital notebook or calendar. I have no problem with that. We’ve all been doing it for years with our phones. I don’t know anyone who can remember a phone number anymore, except maybe their childhood number, as I do. We rely on our phones now to store that kind of information.

‘Outsourcing’ is different. If I ask AI to write this essay for me in its entirety, I’m not just storing information outside my head. I’m handing over the creation of ideas and sentences. That, I suspect, is what my younger friend was worried about. Not just that no one will need to remember things, but that they won’t need to think or create things either. They will be able to hand everything over to their brain extender, a.k.a. AI, and then simply sign their names at the bottom.

At my advanced age, I confess that possibility feels less threatening. I’ve spent over fifty years developing my narrative voice and I know what it’s like to wrestle an essay into shape without digital help. Nowadays, though, I can feel the contours of my mind changing. Names take longer to surface. My concentration frays faster. It’s not yet catastrophic, but it’s undeniable.

Like my energy supply, I recognize that I have a limited amount of focus to allocate every day. I can pour a big chunk of it into the mechanics of writing, or I can outsource some of my labour to a machine and save what’s left for the parts I enjoy the most like developing my ideas and gathering the research I need to express them. When I put it like that, using AI feels less like surrender and more like strategy.

Still, the coffee conversation left me with questions I can’t quite shake. For example, is there a point at which my helpful brain extension quietly takes over the job of being my brain? If I let AI suggest the structure or the phrasing, am I still the author, or am I gradually becoming an editor of someone else’s thoughts?

This is where an older, philosophical neuro-scientific idea has come to my rescue. Almost thirty years ago, British philosopher Andy Clark and Australian cognitive scientist David Chalmers published what’s now known as the Extended Mind Thesis. They argued that our minds aren’t confined only to the grey matter inside our skulls. Rather, they extend into our bodies and surroundings and include the notebooks we rely on, the tools we use automatically (like phones or computers) and even the environments we live in.

Taking that view, our phones aren’t just handy gadgets. They are part of our cognitive systems. If your phone dies, as mine did last summer in Costa Rica along with every important phone number, a piece of your extended mind also shrinks. The same logic suggests that my environment not only includes my phone and laptop, but my AI tools as well. 

For my younger colleague, AI is a threatening brain extension if it prevents her from feeling completely in charge. For me, it feels more like an accommodation than a replacement, like reading glasses or a hearing aid. And I’m not asking AI to actually be me. I’m asking it to help the me that already exists to keep doing the work I love for a little longer, with a little less strain. 

So for now, I will allow AI to help me think but not decide who I am or what I want to say. And full disclosure: I wrote this essay using my favourite go-to ‘brain extension’ app, Perplexity AI. Perhaps fittingly, it was my digital collaborator who reminded me to say that.