If prestige thinking is less essential than we claimed, and if machines can now produce a lot of its outputs cheaply, then what’s coming is not necessarily a tragedy for humanity. It may be a correction.

A correction of our class’s inflated self-regard.

A correction of an educational system that quietly treated one kind of cognition as the apex of... See more

Of course I want to believe thinking, my kind of thinking, is universally essential. What else would I want to believe? The alternative is uncomfortable: that my contribution is specialised, contingent, and possibly less central to human flourishing than I’ve been trained to assume.

Maybe the machine didn’t reveal that consciousness is fake. Maybe it revealed something more mundane and more humiliating: that a large portion of what we sold as thinking was an institutionalised form of patterning all along. That much of what we called creativity was recombination. That much of what we called insight was retrieval plus framing.... See more