Harshini Madhan

I sip this damn fine cup of coffee, that it’s not the being that matters, but the doing.

I sum up people like Mauskopf with the term “quiet influencer.” These are people who aren’t trying to draw attention to themselves but can find a following online because of their ability to listen and absorb information. When they do share, it’s to educate, inform, or entertain others, not to build up their egos.

Socrates once said: The unexamined life is not worth living. But the overexamined life is not worth living either. The Watts trap: “A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So they lose touch with reality and live in a world of illusions.”

But in a ​recent podcast appearance​, James Mariott, a critic and columnist for The Times of London ,summarized a hypothesis that has been gaining traction: as we switch our information consumption from print to digital devices, our ability to think deeply degrades.

Technical skill is your chosen craft. Product thinking is knowing what’s worth doing. Project execution is making sure it happens. People skills are how you work with and influence others.

Thus, Digital Social Reading serves as a timely defense (and instruction manual for the academic study) of joyfully reading fiction in one’s free time: “more than worrying about saving literature,” Pianzola writes, “I think it is important to grant people the right to be saved by the stories they need.”

And maybe prompt engineering isn’t the invention of the AI age at all. It may be a return to something Confucius already intuited: that the form of a question is not overlooked but carries within it the power to direct thought, constrain possibility, and prescribe a certain horizon of answers.

All this raises a provocative question: when we spend hours refining prompts, correcting outputs, and coaxing ChatGPT to deliver our ideal responses, does that make us the teachers of value? Specifically our moral values?