Will Imagination be the Key to Thriving in the Age of AI?

David Brooks in the Atlantic

David Brooks writes about AI and cognitive polarisation.

…the future I’m describing here is one of extreme cognitive polarization. Some people will use AI to think more. Other people, maybe most people, will use AI to think less. If you thought that economic inequality or political polarization were bad, cognitive polarization will be truly terrible, dividing society into what might begin to look like two different species. The high-need-for-cognition people will get more and more productive, happier and happier; the rest will fall into a kind of mental underclass.

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The crucial task before us is to cultivate people’s desire to seek out cognitive complexity. Not to go all Joseph Campbell on you, but the essential challenge is: How do we train people to see their life as a hero’s journey in which they take on difficult missions that they may fail at and that will certainly involve pain and suffering? How do we form people so they have an explorer’s heart, a willingness to endure, an ability to struggle on, even when their body and mind are telling them to give up, to reach new destinations and figure stuff out?

From the Bible and Homer to Virginia Woolf and Helen deWitt, the quest is the fundamental mode of literature. The rise of the novel was the rise of realism, but also the adaptation of the old romance to the new idea of individualism. We might be leaving behind the culture in which novel reading was central to ordinary life, but we are not leaving behind the need to understand our lives as journeys, nor the ability of literature to cultivate “cognitive complexity.”

Brooks takes an institutional and psychological approach to this challenge: autonomy, competence, and relatedness are essential to motivation; schools and apprenticeships can be restructured for those ends; AI can’t “hunger for things”.

I don’t disagree, but as well as “help[ing] people learn to want more, hunger more” we need to enhance their ability to imagine themselves. Motivation relies on imagination. An individual is an imagined person: we are imagined by ourselves and by others and the gap between those two is often formative. We have all been surprised (or appalled) to learn what other people think of us, most especially when they are correct. Isn’t it odd that they can know us better than we know ourselves? They don’t have access to our inner thoughts and feelings. All they can do is imagine us.

Imagination is central to the way people understand themselves and each other. The novelists knew this, and they worked in tandem with philosophers like John Locke and Adam Smith to elaborate a huge body of work that demonstrates and investigates what it means to be an imagined individual. If we want people to understand the quest of their lives, the journey of life as something they imagine themselves undertaking, we could do worse than to encourage them to read Swift, Richardson, Austen, Eliot, and James. In his latest book, Tyler Cowen notes that William Stanley Jevons, one of the first economists to theorise the idea of marginal gains, was directly influenced by Charles Dickens. The same is true of Darwin and Milton, Tesla and Goethe, along with many others.

Being able to change the world, act effectively in the world, relies on your mental model of the world—and of yourself. Those models can be significantly affected by the works of imagination you read, watch, and listen to. Those works give you new models all the time, new ways of connecting the inner and the outer life, new explanations for why people are the way they are, and new maps for the journey you might take. Imagination is essential to our notions of identity, language, and thought. That is part of Locke’s revolution in 1690. And those ideas gave the novelists their starting point.

If the continued improvement of AI means there will be cognitive polarisation, I suspect that imagination will be key to the divide. Rather than relying on a large simple model of the quest like Joseph Campbell, this gives us impetus to return to the great writers of quests, from all areas of literature—Dante and Beowulf as well as Dickens and Tolstoy.

It might just be the case that the future belongs to those who can imagine it.