As AI makes intelligence cheap, effort becomes rare and valuable. People with high need for cognition will wrestle with AI to sharpen their own thinking, while cognitive misers use it for convenience. The difference won't be how smart you are, but whether you choose to think hard.
The guiding emerging principle of AI is this: intelligence is plentiful, volition is valuable. And I've been reading this quite a few times to my team this week because this article was so good. And by the way, actually, no, I'm not going to give people a tip on how you can actually remove the paywall. I'll just leave it at that. If you just type in remove the paywall, you guys don't have to pay for things like this. The guiding principle of emerging AI is this: when intelligence is plentiful— Emma's the new Neil— when intelligence is plentiful, Volition is valuable. So the people who are going to make a difference are not the ones who seek relaxation and passively use AI to work less. They're the ones who seek improvement and actively wrestle with AI to develop their own mental capabilities and accomplish. In other words, what will differentiate people is not how smart you are, but your relationship to mental effort. How many books you read, how much you like studying things, right? How much you like learning. Right now, some people have what psychologists call a high need for cognition. They enjoy thinking hard. These are the people who enjoy playing difficult games. Okay, if someone in the room plays difficult games and reading dense books. On the other end of the spectrum, these are the cognitive misers, the people who find it unpleasant to think hard and take any opportunity to not do it. Neil, we've talked about these lazy people that we know, know who I'm talking about. In the middle are the people who have a medium need for cognition. They will put in the effort when they really need to care about something, but they don't intrinsically enjoy it. Need for cognition correlates with intelligence, but it's not the same thing. We all know a lot of really smart people who don't like to work hard.
