AI

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

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

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 actors and audiences of William Shakespeare’s plays were engaging in an activity that was considered “low-brow” and even unethical by many members of their society . Shakespeare’s theater, The Globe, was ultimately shut down in 1642 in a final win for the long-standing Puritan campaign against drama. One of Shakespeare’s primary competitors, in... 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. This is as true for professionals as it is for students... If reading and writing “rewired” the logic engine of the human brain, the decline of reading and writing are unwiring our cognitive superpower at the... 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.

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

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

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.