Translator: Evelin Giroldi Reviewer: Trina Orsic Today, to get here, I used Waze. I always do the same thing. I get into the car. I enter the address, and follow the instructions given to me by the app. I started doing it because I thought it was a good idea to have traffic information in real time to choose the route. But now, I don’t think about it. It became a habit. While doing research for a book with Mariano Sigman, we realized that as a result of this blind obedience to algorithms, a very important question was being missed: What do I want to do today? Am I in a hurry? Or do I feel like quietly walking along a beautiful path listening to music? I had assumed the goal of the application as my own. The assumption that, in life, always, the most important thing is to arrive quickly. Without realizing it, I had given up asking myself about my desire and choosing my own path. This isn’t the only field where I’m losing my compass. When I want to be entertained, I use Instagram or TikTok. The algorithms of these apps know my weaknesses incredibly well and hammer at them mercilessly. I want to be entertained for five minutes and I end up spending an hour. I am also losing control over my time. The food we give to our brains do not yet come with warnings or labels directly placed. With the advent of conversational AI, such as Chat GPT, a lot of amazing opportunities appear, but there also arises a very significant new risk. Together with Mariano, we named it: Cognitive Sedentarism. In some way, AI seduces us by delegating all our thinking and all our decisions to them. If this happens, technology no longer shapes our thinking, rather, it takes over. It becomes our brain. But the battle is not lost. If we find the right way to use this tool, we can take advantage of the incredible doors that open, trying to avoid the main risks. I want to share an example with you. A teacher asked a group of students to write a composition by themselves on a topic. Once they finished it, they then had to copy and paste it into ChatGPT for ChatGPT to correct it. But what the students had to hand in was neither the initial version, nor the corrected version. Instead, it was a review in which they revised what corrections AI had suggested to them, why they thought ChatGPT suggested those changes, and finally, the most important of all, whether they accepted or rejected each one of the recommendations. In this way, the children learned that AI is a tool that can be used to improve their productions, but also that they are the ones who always have the last word. To illustrate the concept of cognitive sedentarism, I want to practice a reasoning exercise with you. Imagine for a minute that we could bring to the present a human being that was born 10,000 years ago, a caveman. Obviously, he’d have enormous problems to adapt to today’s world. He wouldn’t speak the language, he wouldn’t know symbols. He wouldn’t know what to do when getting in an elevator. But he would probably survive. Now do the opposite exercise. Imagine that we were taken 10,000 years into the past. We wouldn’t last two days. If it were during winter, we’d freeze to death the first night because we don’t know how to make fire to get warm. If we were lucky enough to survive the first night, in the morning we’d have to get some food, but there wouldn’t be any stores or markets. We’d have to catch an animal or figure out what to do. Isn’t it incredible that we’d be more helpless in the past than a caveman in the present? And the reason is simple. Every time we delegate something to technology, we loose abilities. Technology can be something as basic as a match and the ability to light a fire by our own means. If we choose to over-delegate our thinking to machines, we run a similar risk. In this new AI era, perhaps true wisdom isn’t just knowing how to use it, but also knowing when not to use it. Resisting the temptation of a life guided by algorithms, of an optimized life, and being loyal to our own imperfections may result in the key to not end up being cavemen ourselves. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)