When information is cheap, thinking is priceless

Early in my former publishing career, back when I was still in short trousers, I worked as a sub-editor on a woodwork magazine.

Our offices were in the beautiful Georgian city of Bath, in a Grade I listed building that dated back to the 1700s. Jane Austen had once lived in the same street (long before even my time, I hasten to add). Perhaps words were in the air.

It was a formative but intense period of my life. There were only four people in our team and we had to put out a 96-page issue every month. Not surprisingly, long days were the norm. I worked at my desk until gone 10pm on my first day in the job. And my colleagues were still at theirs when I finally trudged home under the yellow glow of the sodium street lamps.

Most of my time there is now a blur. But there’s one particular moment that still stands out in my otherwise hazy memory of those years.

One afternoon, just after lunch, I was handed a feature article to edit. It was all about how a young student at a college in County Galway, Ireland, had carved a stunning jewellery box out of a single piece of Lebanese cedar.

My editing task should have been simple. The article was well written, and the designer had already chosen a photo that perfectly displayed the box’s flowing natural lines and the timber’s deep red grain.

Staring in horror

But I had one small problem: we didn’t have enough words to fill the space – and I had to make up the difference.

I remember opening the file and staring in horror at the 200 words of Latin Lorem ipsum placeholder text filling a box added by the designer to pad out the page.

I glanced at my watch. I had less than two hours.

Fortunately for me (I realise now, with hindsight), I also had no time to overthink the problem.

Suppressing my panic, I opted to fill the space by researching and writing a short travel piece on Letterfrack, the small village in Connemara that was the college’s home.

No Google

The trouble was, this was the early 90s. There was no Google.

So I grabbed my notebook, dashed round to Waterstones bookshop in Milsom Street, and spent the next half an hour poring over Ireland travel guides, scribbling furiously and collecting as much information as I could.

Then I just had to hotfoot it back to the office, write my copy and edit the rest of the piece.

I still don’t know how I made my deadline, but I did.

My editor signed off the pages and the magazine went to press. I even received a letter from the college’s principal a fortnight later, congratulating me on capturing the area’s beauty perfectly. Little did he know I’d never been there. (I still haven’t, although I really should. It looks truly beautiful from the photos I’ve just found after taking around 1.5 seconds to type ‘Letterfrack’ into a web browser.)

Information everywhere

So why am I telling you this? To highlight the massive shift in the way we work since my time as a junior editor.

The problem I had faced back then wasn’t technically a lack of time. After all, I met my deadline. However much the task might have felt impossible, it clearly wasn’t.

Nor was it a writing problem. Once the tight deadline spurred me into action, my usual tendency to procrastinate vanished and the words came.

The thing I was missing was information.

My, how things have changed since those days. We may have many problems at work, but access to information is rarely one of them.

Information is everywhere: on the web, on SharePoint, in our email. In PDFs, Word documents and direct messages. And now information (so much information) provided by AI.

Yet far from solving what would seem like one of the biggest writing problems, this actually seems to have made our lives far more difficult.

Part of the issue is that, for most of the time that humans have been on this planet, information was pretty scarce. So we’ve evolved an innate drive to keep looking for it. That’s what made our ancestors venture out of the cave to find food or a mate. Without it, they would have all starved to death and there would be no us. Fortunately, they didn’t and we all inherited their curiosity genes.

And now, we’re all wired to seek. No matter how much information we have, we always want more.

Finding information feels so good. Every new Google result releases a pleasant shot of dopamine in the brain. It’s also literally addictive. That dopamine is the same hormone that makes crack users crave their next hit and keeps them hooked.

Thinking is hard

Crucially, seeking information feels much easier than thinking. Thinking is hard. It uses up vital mental resources. So our brains try to protect us by avoiding it as much as possible.

Searching feels way more pleasant. That’s why, when we’re faced with a task – a report to produce, a strategy to devise – we often overcome our discomfort by seeking information. Any information will do: it doesn’t have to be relevant to what we’re working on. We check our email. We check our messages. We check the news.

Even the thought of checking it makes us feel better. (It’s the anticipation that triggers the dopamine hit.) But that feeling doesn’t last long. Because the answer is not in our inboxes, of course. It’s in our brains. We need to do the work.

What we are doing is overloading our brains and so actively reducing our ability to get the work done.

‘Would you like that as a TED talk?’

AI makes this problem much worse, in two key ways.

First of all, we often turn to AI in the hope that it will do the thinking for us. Now, to be clear, it can help, but only if you know how to use it to enhance your own thinking. What most people do though is to offload the thought process entirely, which is fraught with problems.

The resulting output often contains factual inaccuracies, for instance. It may even be saying things that we don’t agree with. But because it’s fluent and looks familiar (containing the terms that we gave it) we often don’t notice. It also damages our ability to think for ourselves, which makes us ever more reliant on AI tools.

Secondly, it generates a lot of information. And, at its default setting, it will keep asking us if we want even more.

‘I can produce a 5-year roadmap, a 10-year roadmap and a 50-year moonshot vision. Which would you like first?’

‘Shall I war-game three competitor counter-moves set in 2035?’

‘Want me to rewrite the whole thing in the style of a Harvard Business Review cover story? Or as a TED talk?’

Duped by AI

It teases us with ‘helpful’ offers that trigger our curiosity instincts and tempt us down ever-deeper rabbit holes. Each question just spawns more text to wade through.

This creates a massive problem, because we get to the point where we cannot cope with the sheer volume of information we’re generating. And we get to that point very quickly.

It’s then that one of two things happens – and neither of them is good. The first is that we become so paralysed that progress grinds to a halt.

The second is that we’re duped into thinking that all those plausible-sounding, impressive words are actually pretty good. So we default to using them wholesale.

That scenario is often even worse than the first, because we risk distributing documents that don’t reflect what we believe or that confidently present errors as facts.

Choking the system

At best, we end up contributing to someone else’s information problem. And when everyone does that, they choke the system and slow everyone else’s thought processes to a crawl, too.

Research is not thinking. Generating text with AI chatbots is not thinking.

There comes a point where we have to take the information we’ve collected, think with it and turn it into something that comes from our own brains.

We have to write something that’s all us.

If we don’t – and this may sound harsh, I know – we shouldn’t be surprised if someone, somewhere starts wondering if they might be better off just outsourcing our jobs to AI, too.

Image credit: PeopleImages / Shutterstock