Eroding a virtue: AI trains people to expect instant answers, and that’s bad news for patience

When I was growing up, teachers would assign research papers that required going to the library, or later, searching for relevant material on the internet. If the paper was going to turn out well, we students needed to patiently comb through piles of material, weaving what we found into a coherent argument that was well-supported with evidence.

Unbeknownst to us at the time, our teachers were giving us a chance to develop our patience.

That chance is rapidly disappearing with increased use of artificial intelligence tools. Now you can have an AI do everything from school assignments to legal writing, sermon preparation, vacation planning, work emails and academic research. Researchers are already documenting how using AI tools in these contexts likely erodes critical thinking skills.

But what hasn’t been appreciated is AI’s effect on patience. As a philosopher who has written extensively about virtue, including the virtue of patience, I am especially concerned about what people can do to resist this trend.

What is patience, and why is it important?

Patience involves responding calmly when it is taking longer than you want to accomplish your goals.

When I am stuck in a traffic jam, or the checkout line is barely moving, I might wish that I was meeting my goals faster, but my calm demeanor is a sign that I am being patient. If I react to delays like these with frustration or anger, that is a sign that I am being impatient.

The same applies in the case of doing research. If it is taking me awhile to find everything I need, that can test my patience. But if I react to such a delay with calmness, I avoid frustration or anger and hence impatience.

Philosophers, theologians and educators have long considered patience an important character trait to cultivate. It is a virtue that contributes to well-being. More specifically, researchers have linked it to a variety of good outcomes, including healthier lifestyles, greater emotion regulation, more fulfilling relationships, increased caring about equity and justice, increased cooperation, greater purpose in life, lower depression and higher life satisfaction.

Why AI tools erode a capacity for patience

AI tools are helping foster a culture of immediacy, thereby diminishing the capacity for patience. Admittedly, we already started down this path with the dawn of the internet and the launch of fast and easy search engines. But now, AI instantaneously delivers fully developed answers, further reducing the delays once experienced as people searched, assessed and integrated information from various sources.

The training in patience that people used to get from thorough research and investigation is being replaced by a growing sense of impatience with thinking that takes time and effort. And this impatience doesn’t just stop with research. It extends to writing as well.

Research on AI and patience is still in its infancy. But my conclusions about these impacts rest on plausible inferences from what researchers know more generally about cognitive psychology. For instance, psychologists have long understood that people’s expectations change due to repeated use and exposure to something.

This adaptation explains why the hourlong train ride to work can start out as exhausting, but become part of your daily routine. Or you might initially be impressed by how fast your new computer is, but after a while you take it for granted and get frustrated if loading a PowerPoint presentation takes even a few moments.

Hence using AI tools is likely to recalibrate what feels normal to you. In particular, it is likely to normalize getting immediate, fully formed answers to your questions. This shift, I contend, makes people increasingly impatient with the very tasks of research and investigation that helped train us to become more patient in the past.

One concrete illustration of this change is with students. If a professor gives an assignment involving interpreting an author’s text and then developing a critique of the author’s position, students today are very tempted to offload the patient work of interpretation and critique to an AI.

Or consider sermon preparation. Pastors normally take hours a week to examine the original language for their text, consult commentaries, develop illustrations and examples, and deliberate about practical applications. Now, this process can all be done in a matter of seconds using AI, and one study found that a majority of pastors are using it for sermon preparation. There is no patience training happening here.

What can be done?

There are ways to cultivate patience in the age of AI tools, but they will not be easy. Here are three:

• Deliberately choose a slower path. Select this option because it comes with intellectual struggles, not in spite of them. Don’t rely on AI summaries or shortcuts, but try to come up with the answers on your own. This choice needs to be deliberative since the default human tendency is to take the easier route. But the long-term benefit is worth the short-term cost.
• Design your environment. Remove AI tools from your surroundings and carve out dedicated time free of distractions and notifications. Reading and writing take time, and by being willing to invest that time and not get impatient with how long it is taking, you can cultivate patience.
• Encourage and reward intellectual engagement. Institutions such as schools and churches have a structural role to play. The more such institutions can resist integrating AI tools into every aspect of their operations, and instead incentivize human intellectual engagement even at the expense of efficiency, the better as far as patience is concerned.

There is one other hopeful suggestion. Patience can be developed in lots of different areas of life that have nothing to do with research and which are less susceptible to AI incursion. Working on a craft project, detailing a car, weeding a garden, practicing your basketball shot, lifting weights — all these activities can foster patience too. The more this character muscle is strengthened, the more it will be available to use in many different areas of your life. – Rappler.com

This story originally appeared on The Conversation.

Christian B. Miller, Professor of Philosophy, Wake Forest University