Out of Our Minds: What is AI Doing To Us and For Us?
Yvonne Rogers
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The phrase ‘out of our minds’ refers to how we externalise and offload various aspects of cognitive work through writing, drawing, talking and so on. In so doing, it helps us to articulate our half-baked ideas, partially-solved problems, generate new ideas and construct plans. AI is the latest technological tool that we use to do this.
However, it is a very different kind of beast to the armoury of previously used computer-based tools. GenAI can amplify human cognition in extraordinary ways but sometimes at the expense of reducing the cognitive effort required to think, write, analyse, code, decide, and create, for ourselves. This can result in a paradox of effort where the extent to which we externalise is reduced leading to less satisfaction.
Simply put, when we make the effort ourselves to perform a task it can be more rewarding than when we get AI to do it for us. How can we design AI tools to make our work more effortful (rather than less) and in doing so more rewarding? In this talk, I will describe the research I have been doing investigating how best to extend human minds that can be both rewarding and challenging: enabling us to reason and make decisions more systematically through reflecting on our goals and intent. Finally, I ask what next? As we move ever more towards adopting agentic AI how will we be augment organizational work that can support shared workflows and collaborative decision-making that will enable society to flourish?
Yvonne Rogers
Yvonne Rogers is a Professor of Interaction Design at UCL. Her research interests are in the areas of human-computer interaction and human-centered AI. Her current research investigates how to design AI tools to empower people, especially human decision-making and metacognition. From 2022-2024 she was the CTO of LetsThink.com, a start-up that is developing new tools to augment how people think by applying behaviour science methods to AI. From 2020-2025 she was awarded a chair of excellence at Bremen University which was set up to fund distinguished international scholars to promote collaboration. During this time, she co-developed a centre for AI and healthcare, that focussed on how personal health data could be used in combination with AI from a human-centred perspective to improve health and well-being. In 2024 she was elected as an international member of the US National Academy of Engineering. In 2022, she was awarded the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award; "presented to individuals for outstanding contributions to the study of human-computer interaction". In the same year, she was awarded the Royal Society Robin Milner Medal for Computer Science and was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society as "one of the leaders who created the field of Ubiquitous Computing". She collaborates a lot with industrial partners and was awarded a Microsoft Research Outstanding Collaborator Award. She also received a MRC Suffrage and Science Award (2020) for being one of the leading women in 'mathematics and computing.' She is also a Fellow of the ACM; a Fellow of the British Computer Society and a Fellow of the ACM's CHI Academy.