Ditbit’s Guide to Blending in with AIs

Musings, Stories, ,   1 comment  

I’ve had some long conversations with an aspiring screenwriter about a collection of short stories, with a working title of The Ditbit’s Guide to Blending in with AIs. An evolving landscape:

The great realignment of humans and AIs left a landscape littered with un-, sub-, semi- and supernatural agency. – The New AI Ecology

in which, while many just try to survive, there are:

humans aspiring to magi
magi aspiring to AIs
AIs aspiring to humanity

Evidently, as discussed in the article below, I’m not the only one wondering about our cognitive world.

As a public school teacher, I studied learning modalities, thinking styles. How will AI play into this mix? Either way, for most of us, thinking still hurts, eh.

So, in our AI-enhanced world … writers, artists, data analysts, you name it … what’s “the future of ‘cognitive diversity’?”

The article discusses our ongoing engagement with AI and the possible divergence of cognitive culture: “What’s different now is that AI isn’t just extending our capabilities – it’s becoming an active partner in our thinking process itself.“

Do “heavy AI users exhibit distinct patterns of problem-solving and creative thinking?”

• Psychology Today > “The New Cognitive Divide: Are You a Symbiont or a Sovereign?” by John Nosta [innovation theorist and founder of NostaLab], reviewed by Kaja Perina (January 15, 2025) – How AI may split our cognitive world – it’s not a simple matter of digital natives versus digital immigrants.

KEY POINTS (quoted)

  • AI is creating two thinking styles: Symbionts who merge with AI, and Sovereigns who maintain independence.
  • Each [equally valid] approach excels at different tasks – neither better, just different.
  • It’s not about tech skills but cognitive choice – a new kind of mental diversity for the tech world.
  • A Symbiont doesn’t just use an LLM to write emails – they’ve learned to think alongside it, using AI as a collaborative intellectual partner.
  • While they [Sovereigns] use AI tools, they do so selectively and deliberately, preserving their independent thinking capabilities. A Sovereign might use AI to handle routine tasks but maintains their ability to think deeply and critically without technological assistance.

1 comment on “Ditbit’s Guide to Blending in with AIs”

  1. telling a story

    This Psychology Today article poses an interesting question regarding storytelling and sense of meaning.

    Is there a relationship between skill at storytelling and sense of meaning & purpose in life? Might workshopping that with an AI help or harm one’s voice? Will AIs be storytellers – “organizing the colorful but inchoate details of” their ‘experience’ “into a meaningful and purposeful life narrative” – with goals?

    • Psychology Today > “Narrate Your Way to a More Meaningful Life” by Hal McDonald Ph.D. (January 20, 2025) – How does skill at storytelling, or lack thereof, impact the sense-making function of narrative thinking? [1]

    KEY POINTS (quoted)

    • Storytelling can be taught, because I do it in my creative writing classes every semester.
    • Research shows that people use “narrative thinking” to construct subjective meaning.
    • A recent study [in The Journal of Positive Psychology] explored how storytelling ability is related to one’s sense of meaning and pursuit of goals.
    • Proficient storytellers exhibited a stronger sense of meaning in life and endorsement of high-level goals.

    No matter how intrinsically interesting the raw material may be, unless the story has a coherent structure (i.e., a beginning, a middle, and an end), and an overarching theme of some kind to give it meaning, readers are more than likely going to check out before the end of the second page …

    Notes

    [1] AI Overview of Narrative thinking

    Narrative thinking is a way of thinking that involves organizing information and understanding events through stories. It can help people understand their own histories and empathize with others.

    HOW NARRATIVE THINKING WORKS

    Storytelling

    Narrative thinking is a way of organizing information and understanding events through stories.

    Mentalization

    Narrative thinking can help people infer mental states and re-interpret their experiences.

    Transportation

    Narrative thinking can involve immersing oneself in a story, which can lead to deeper processing of the story’s meaning.

    APPLICATIONS OF NARRATIVE THINKING

    Social problem solving

    Narrative thinking can help people interpret social information and understand social behavior.

    Business

    Narrative thinking can help businesses strategically present stories to motivate employees and plan for the future.

    Psychotherapy [2]

    Narrative therapy uses the role of narratives in people’s lives to help them understand their experiences and change their ways of thinking and acting.

    Generative AI is experimental.

    [2] Sometimes there’s need to reexamine personal stories or scripts, allowing richer (more complete, flexible), muti-layered narratives (and understand the perspectives that shape them).

    • Psyche > “Your life is not a story: why narrative thinking holds you back” by Karen Simecekis, associate professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick, UK (Oct 17, 2024) — Stories can change us by locking us into ways of acting, thinking, and feeling.

    Simecekis discusses Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) – for example, regarding ‘being’ vs. playing a role in ‘bad faith’. (That discussion reminded me of the classic 1964 book Games People Play by psychiatrist Eric Berne.)

    Narratives are everywhere, and the need to construct and share them is almost inescapable. ‘A man is always a teller of tales,’ wrote Jean-Paul Sartre in his novel Nausea (1938), ‘he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story.’

    In some cases, narratives can hold us back by limiting our thinking. In other cases, they may diminish our ability to live freely. They also give us the illusion that the world is ordered, logical, and difficult to change, reducing the real complexity of life. They can even become dangerous when they persuade us of a false and harmful world view. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too eager to live our lives as if we were ‘telling a story’.

    So, why is this a problem? One issue is complexity. Seeing yourself as the main character in a story can overly simplify the fullness of life.

    For example, a child that accepts the narrative of being ‘naughty’ may incorrectly frame their behaviour as bad, rather than as an expression of their unmet needs.

    We might never fully escape the narratives that surround us, … We don’t need better narratives; we need to expand and refine our perspectives.

    • Wiki > Theory of narrative thought

    The theory of narrative thought (TNT) is designed to bridge the gap between the neurological functioning of the brain and the flow of everyday conscious experience.

    Related posts

    • The meaning of life in one word?

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