Dr. Nicholas Kardaras - Is AI making us dependent on machines to think?

A new study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon, Oxford, MIT, and UCLA suggests even brief exposure to AI tools can reduce independent problem-solving ability and persistence when the technology is taken away. Are Americans becoming too dependent on artificial intelligence?

Nicholas Kardaras is the Founder and CEO of Omega Recovery and author of Digital Madness and Glow Kids. He joins the show to discuss the latest research on AI's impact on cognition, the growing concern over digital dependency, and whether constant reliance on technology is weakening the skills needed for critical thinking and lifelong learning.

Transcript

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Ah, welcome back to the Lawrence Larson Show. Now, you've heard my skepticism about artificial intelligence. I'm not really crazy about the entire idea at all. But having said that, there's a new study out that says scientists say just 15 minutes with artificial intelligence can start rewiring your brain and not for the better. Are we raising a generation that won't know how to think without a machine? I thought we'd talk to Dr. Nicholas Cardez, who is founder and CEO of Omega Recovery and author of Digital Madness and Glow Kids. Dr. Cardez, welcome to the program. Great. Thanks for having me, Lars. Great to be here. Would you mind telling my audience what omega recovery is all about? So we're one of the only treatment programs in the country that treats technology addiction as a primary disorder. So we treat uh young adults, 17 to 30 year olds, failure to launch. Typically, a lot of college students who are not thriving, they get stuck in mom and dad's basement because of a mental health combined with a digital overuse problem, and they need residential treatment to get their lives back on track. Do you have a pretty good batting record for getting them back on track? Yeah, we do actually. We do. You know, I will say technology addiction. I'm an addiction psychologist. I've treated, you know, crystal meth and heroin and substance addictions for 25 years. It's more squirrely and trickier treating digital addiction because it's so ubiquitous and pervasive in our society. You know, you could quit heroin or alcohol and live your life clean and sober. It's really hard to unring the bell once you've kind of crossed the line into technology addiction. So there are there are challenges there that make it even more difficult than substance addiction to treat. Well, that's yeah, we have a pretty good batting average, yeah. And and Dr. Carderas, uh I guess most of our use of technology is not, I mean, immediately offensive to people around us. In other words, if I'm sitting with a group of people and I happen to pick up my phone and look at the screen to see what what you know what messages I've received, uh it might be seen as rude, but it's it's not like if I picked up a needle and started shooting heroin in a vein in front of a group of people. I would imagine that would get a much more vociferous uh kind of reaction. Yeah, yeah, we don't have obviously right, there's not defentinal overdose rates where you're not having over 100,000 people dying from it. But what we are seeing is our whole society over the last 10 to 15 years, we're going through a mental health epidemic that is directly related to our screen love affair. You know, what I like to say is uh as of as we've become mad for our devices, our devices have been driving us mad. So record rates of depression, anxiety, ADHD, we're all becoming more impacted. Some vulnerable younger people are more impacted. I don't know how old you are, you might be similar in age to how old I am, but we've even we're affected. I don't have the same attention span reading a book that I used to 15 years ago because of you know the the immersion that we all have in technology, but young people are disproportionately affected in much more impactful ways. So, what's the what's the best way to br to break that? And and what are glow kids, by the way? Glow kids are the the kids that we see in restaurants, airports, supermarkets where their faces are just lit up by the glowing screen. They're they're just so close to their screen device that they're glowing with that blue glow. Um and it's it's generational. So, you know, I'm also a university professor, so I teach graduate students that have you know grown up around social media over the last 10 years. So it's not just that you become addicted to your device, but it's now it's worn down our critical thinking. It's worn down our ability to not be impulsive. There's neurophysiological MRI research that shows the parts of our brain that are related to executive functioning, which are affected by drug addiction, are the exact same parts of the brain that are affected and compromised by screen addiction. So people that are on their devices for too much, they have compromised impulsivity. They're impulsive about other things now, too. You might be more impulsive about other kinds of behaviors, including substance addiction. So it's it's not just that you're, I can't put my phone down. It's being attached to my phone is making me more um it's it's wearing down my psychological immune system to all sorts of other psychiatric issues as well, like depression, anxiety, and all those things that we talked about. Wow, because I could imagine there there would have been a time, say 20 years ago, and people imagined that someday we'll have ways to get people mental health care through that device, and now it sounds like the device is causing the problem instead. Well, the you know, there are a couple of platforms. There's couple I won't mention their names, but they're trying to, you know, meet the client where they're at is the phrase, and they're trying to give you medical and you know, so it's telehealth is a big market, but that's been the problem. I mean, why are we going through record rates of suicide, ADHD, depression? Everything has spiked since 2010 when social media swallowed up the planet. And now AI is essentially kerosene on social media. AI is now making predictive algorithms turbocharged, and AI is creating the study that you referred to, its own dependency that's wearing down people's ability to critically think. I've worked with students and clients in my treatment program. They use AI like the Oracle of Delphi. They're like, AI, what should I do in my relationship? Um, Chat GBT, tell me what decision I should make here or there. So if you're not able to start figuring out your own issues in your own life and you start relying on AI as the Oracle to help you, those abilities get compromised. It's the it's the classic example of use it or lose it. There's a reason why older people with dementia and Alzheimer's do Sudoku and crossword puzzles. You've got to flex those muscles to keep them optimal. Our young people are getting mentally lazy because they're becoming so dependent on some of their digital media that it's made them not only physically obese and, you know, let's face it, not prime figures of health, but mentally too. It's just eroded their mental health. That's why our youngest people today have the worst mental health metrics in recorded history. I'm talking to Dr. Nicholas Cardeiras, who's founder and CEO of Omega Recovery and author of Digital Madness and the Glow Kids. Tell me what you make of this study. It was done by four majors, and that's Carnegie, Mellon, Oxford MIT, and UCLA. That said as little as 10 or 15 minutes of interaction with AI results in significant impairment in independent performance. It sounds incredibly toxic. Yeah, it is. And I think we're finally waking up to the realities that many of us were seeing. You know, some of us were seeing it as as parents, as a as you know, people living in society. I was seeing it clinically in the trenches. That study validates our clinical experience. They they said, you know, with social media and with different experiences online, it would there would be an erosion that would happen. There would be cognitive declines. Now, especially when you put a tablet in front of a developing child, and they did one significant MRI study uh four years ago that was published in uh the Journal of American Medical Association, Pediatrics, and over an hour of screen time for kids one to three years old was significantly affecting their cognitive processes, their language acquisition, their ability to uh their abilities to think essentially. And and AI is that, as I said before on steroids, AI creates a dependency that I think just sort of uh creates a mental rot that we're seeing. I mean, I'm working with 19, 20-year-olds, kids that were smart, you know, kids that had some aptitude when they were younger, and you just see the softening up of their mental capacities. And the other part of it is that you see not only are they mentally soft or not able to do the critical thinking or the mental heavy lifting, but they're also emotionally dysregulated. Uh unbelievable. Dr. Nicholas Cardeiras, who's founder and CEO of Omega Recovery, author of Digital Madness and Glow Kids, we'll be back in just a moment. Thanks, Dr. Cardeiras. You're listening to the Lars Larson show.