I am much more concerned about the decline of today’s thinking people than I am about the rise of tomorrow’s thinking machines. (View Highlight)
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. (View Highlight)
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. (View Highlight)
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. (View Highlight)
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. (View Highlight)
According to Ong, literacy is no passing skill. It was a means of restructuring human thought and knowledge to create space for complex ideas. (View Highlight)
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. (View Highlight)
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. (View Highlight)
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. (View Highlight)