In movies about impending planetary disasters, we often see the world come together to prepare to meet the threat directly. One might imagine, then, that the potential arrival of all-knowing AI would serve as a galvanizing threat, like a Sputnik moment for our collective capacity to think deeply. Instead, I fear we’re preparing for the alleged... See more

In fitness, there is a concept called “time under tension.” Take a simple squat, where you hold a weight and lower your hips from a standing position. With the same weight, a person can do a squat in two seconds or ten seconds. The latter is harder but it also builds more muscle. More time is more tension; more pain is more gain.

Thinking benefits... See more

Maybe he’s right. But I think the more likely scenario will be nothing so grand as the end of civilization. We will not become barbarous, violent, or remotely exciting to each other or ourselves. No Gibbon will document the decline and fall of the mind, because there will be no outward event to observe. Leisure time will rise, home life will take... See more

In a viral essay entitled “The dawn of the post-literate society and the end of civilization,” the author James Marriott writes about the decline of thinking in mythic terms that would impress Edward Gibbon. As writing and reading decline in the age of machines, Marriott forecasts that the faculties that allowed us to make sense of the world will... See more

Students, scientists, and anyone else who lets AI do the writing for them will find their screens full of words and their minds emptied of thought.

We are so fixated on how technology will out-skill us that we miss the many ways that technology can de-skill us.

The dilemma is clear in medical schools, which are encouraging students to use LLMs, even as conscientious students will have to take care that their skills advance alongside AI rather than atrophy in the presence of the technology. “I’m worried these tools will erode my ability to make an independent diagnosis,” Benjamin Popokh, a medical student... See more

Newport’s warning echoes an observation made by the scholar Walter Ong in his book Orality and Literacy . According to Ong, literacy is no passing skill. It was a means of restructuring human thought and knowledge to create space for complex ideas. Stories can be memorized by people who cannot read or write. But nothing as advanced as, say,... See more

Other research has shown that “task-switching” between social media and homework is correlated with lower GPAs and that students whose cellphones are taken away in experimental settings do better on tests.