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.

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

The demise of writing matters, because writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking.

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 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

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

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

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.

students on their phones take fewer notes and retain less information from class. 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.