AI

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book because there would be no one who wanted to read one.

— Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

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.

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. This is as true for professionals as it is for students. In “Writing Is Thinking,” an editorial in Nature , the authors argued that “outsourcing the entire writing process to [large language models]” deprives... See more

But in the long run, societies don’t simply survive new media technologies passively. They negotiate with them. The eighteenth-century audiences who worried about novels didn’t stop reading them. Instead, they developed new practices for understanding what to get out of them. Eventually, they canonized some novels as “literature” worth sustained... See more

Our goal must be to deliberately, and flexibly, maintain conditions where sustained attention remains valued.

The kind of observation found in a book entitled The Evils of Adultery and Prostitution (1792) was not uncommon: “A ... cause of the profligacy of the present age, is that mass of novels and romances which people of all ranks and ages do so greedily devour. This is a new species of entertainment, almost totally unknown to former ages .... The great... See more