AI

We can’t address the decline in empathy without addressing the decline in attention . Empathy requires a degree of sustained focus:

• Paying attention to an experience someone is sharing


• Recalling experiencing a similar emotional response


• Sitting with your own and the other person’s inner state

When we are fragmented and distracted , we simply can’t com... See more

But this isn’t about phone numbers or navigation. It’s about how technology clearly changes our minds. And there is a risk that today’s siphoning of young brains into phones and laptops isn’t just happening with maps and digits, but with critical thinking and complex language.

Artificial intelligence is already killing off important parts of the human experience. But one of its most consequential murders—so far—is the demise of a longstanding rite of passage for students worldwide: an attempt to synthesize complex information and condense it into compelling analytical prose. It’s a training ground for the most quintessen... See more

The writing is getting better. The ideas are getting worse. There’s a new genre of essay that other academics reading this will instantly recognize, a clumsy collaboration between students and Silicon Valley. I call it glittering sludge .

Through linguistic offshoots, such as writing, we are able to practice a unique phenomenon: exbodiment , in which byproducts of our cognition can be captured, stored, shared, and passed through generations.

By mistaking language as merely a tool that’s a means to an end—little different from a spatula—too many people have lost sight of the fact that understanding language provides the basis of smart thinking.

Even the regulatory arena, where Altman publicly champions AI oversight, bears the fingerprints of double-dealing. While testifying in favor of federal regulation, OpenAI lobbied behind the scenes to weaken the EU AI Act and is now advocating for federal preemption of state AI safety laws in the US. Altman has called the very regulatory structure h... See more