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Many predict AI will soon steal jobs and build super-smart machines.
But the real danger is that people are already outsourcing thinking to AI, eroding reading, writing, and deep thought.
If we don’t protect those skills, creativity, expertise, and democracy will weaken.
Highlights
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I am much more concerned about the decline of today’s thinking people than I am about the rise of tomorrow’s thinking machines.
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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.
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Students, scientists, and anyone else who lets AI do the writing for them will find their screens full of words and their minds emptied of thought.
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Americans are reading words all the time: email, texts, social media newsfeeds, subtitles on Netflix shows. But these words live in fragments that hardly require any kind of sustained focus; and, indeed, Americans in the digital age don’t seem interested in, or capable of, sitting with anything linguistically weightier than a tweet.
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the intuition that technology steals our focus has been proven out by several studies that found that students on their phones take fewer notes and retain less information from class.
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According to Ong, literacy is no passing skill. It was a means of restructuring human thought and knowledge to create space for complex ideas.
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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 very moment that a greater machine appears to be on the horizon.
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The most common question I get from parents anxious about the future of their children is: What should my kid study in an age of AI? I don’t know what field any particular student should major in, I say. But I do feel strongly about what skill they should value. It’s the very same skill that I see in decline. It’s the skill of deep thinking.
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Thinking benefits from a similar principle of “time under tension.” It is the ability to sit patiently with a group of barely connected or disconnected ideas that allows a thinker to braid them together into something that is combinatorially new.