The End of Thinking

In the last few months, top AI executives and thinkers have offered an eerily specific and troubling prediction about how long it will be before artificial intelligence takes over the economy. The message is: “YOU HAVE 18 MONTHS.”

By the summer of 2027, they say, AI’s explosion in capabilities will leave carbon-based life forms in the dust. Up to “half of all entry-level white-collar jobs” will be wiped out, and even Nobel Prize-worthy minds will cower in fear once AI’s architects have built a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.” I do not like this prediction, for several reasons. First, it’s no fun to imagine my imminent worthlessness. Second, it’s hard for me to take seriously economic predictions that resemble a kind of secular Rapture, in which a god-like entity descends upon the earth and makes whole categories of human activity disappear with a wave of His (Its?) hand. Third, and most importantly, the doom-and-gloom 18-month forecast asks us to imagine how software will soon make human capabilities worthless, when the far more significant crisis that I see is precisely the opposite. Young people are already degrading their cognitive capabilities by outsourcing their minds to machines long before software is ready to steal their jobs. I am much more concerned about the decline of today’s thinking people than I am about the rise of tomorrow’s thinking machines.

In March, New York magazine published the sort of cover story that goes instantly viral, not because of its shock value, but, quite the opposite, because it loudly proclaimed what most people were already thinking: Everybody is using AI to cheat their way through school.

By allowing high school and college students to summon into existence any essay on any topic, large language models have created an existential crisis for teachers trying to evaluate their students’ ability to actually write, as opposed to their ability to prompt an LLM to do all their homework. “College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,” one student said. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” a professor echoed.

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 scientists of the important work of understanding what they’ve discovered and why it matters. 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.

As writing skills have declined, reading has declined even more. “Most of our students are functionally illiterate,” a pseudonymous college professor using the name Hilarius Bookbinder wrote in a March Substack essay on the state of college campuses. “This is not a joke.” Nor is it hyperbole. Achievement scores in literacy and numeracy are declining across the West for the first time in decades, leading the Financial Times reporter John Burn-Murdoch to wonder if humans have “passed peak brain power” at the very moment that we are building machines to think for us. In the U.S., the so-called National Report Card published by the NAEP recently found that average reading scores hit a 32-year low — which is troubling, as the data series only goes back 32 years.

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. The share of Americans overall who say they read books for leisure has declined by nearly 50 percent since the 2000s. In another essay observing that “American students are getting dumber,” Matt Yglesias quoted the education writer Chad Aldeman, who has noted that declines in 12th grade scores are concentrated among the worst-performing students.

Even America’s smartest teenagers have essentially stopped reading anything longer than a paragraph. Last year, The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch reported that students are matriculating into America’s most elite colleges without having ever read a full book. “Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown’s English department, told me that his students have trouble staying focused on even a sonnet,” Horowitch wrote. Nat Malkus, an education researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, suggested to me that high schools have chunkified books to prepare students for the reading-comprehension sections of standardized exams. By optimizing the assessment of reading skills, perhaps, the US education system has accidentally contributed to the slow death of book-reading.

Did an AI write this?

I’ve been hearing “you only have X months” since 2022 and that number hasn’t been budging despite the passage of time.

Talk all you want about how much better AI is getting at performing in benchmarks but it still fails to do the tangible things people and organizations actually want/need it do well.