Outsourcing hard thinking

I think I finally put my finger on the part of the discussion around AI that makes me a bit more skeptical than most. There was a recent Cal Newport podcast where he was discussing the work that it takes to actually train your mind to do deep thinking. He contrasted this with the way that businesses generally think about work today, which is focused on computation rather than cognition. It's all about how quick can you process this information and move it somewhere else, rather than taking the time to think deeply about a concept and synthesize something new and interesting.

As AI increasingly enters the workplace this concept is being extended, essentially, to say that knowledge workers will be able to compute things much quicker, since they will just need to enter a few prompts which will automatically change data from one format to another or write a piece of content for them. But this vision essentially means that work will get shallower and shallower, because what's really mentally difficult about typing prompts for a chatbot?

This vision of the future of work assumes that we will outsource all of the work that actually builds our ability to think deeper, while we write prompts, sit in meetings and send emails. I think that the people who can fight back against this and keep big blocks of their day to do difficult work and think about challenging concepts will come out ahead, as the competition will get duller and less creative when it comes to solving problems. What this means as a society though, is a different question, but I think there will be some market forces that will incentivize small, agile companies to create workplaces that are not outsourcing their hardest thinking to AI.