“Will AI create a generation of non-thinkers?,” asked Bharat Chandar, — a postdoctoral researcher at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, — in an essay published earlier this year in his Substack platform. In the essay, Chandar wrote about his concerns that a generation of students may not be able to develop the critical skills necessary to think for themselves because they’ve been increasingly relying on AI for their learning assignments.
“Recall staring blankly at a page, struggling to come up with an answer to an essay prompt. Formulating and articulating a thought might have taken hours, each sentence revised over and over. Working through writer’s block to craft a compelling argument was a painstaking rite of passage towards becoming an effective thinker and communicator. Do students today have this experience? If AI can write our essays, what happens to human thought?”
The essay references a recent survey that found that AI is being rapidly adopted by students for completing their coursework. This raises troublesome questions, said Chandar. If they are counting on AI to do the work for them, a generation of students may not learn the critical skills necessary think for themselves, — a serious problem in an increasingly complex world. “Even in a world with AI superintelligence, we will always have the responsibility to make tough decisions. And, making such tough decisions requires critical thinking skills,” wrote Chandar in a related essay.
Even more troublesome questions are raised in “Without Books We Will Be Barbarians,” an essay recently published in The Free Press by historian Niall Ferguson, — Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a senior faculty fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. With declining literacy and the skills needed to thrive in an increasingly complex world, it’s not just AGI serfdom that awaits — “but the steep downward slope to the status of a peasant in ancient Egypt,”said Ferguson.
“The evidence has been accumulating for some time that Americans are no longer choosing to read.” A recent study of over 236,000 Americans “found that the proportion who read for pleasure has fallen dramatically since the turn of the century. On an average day in 2003, 28 percent of Americans would read; by 2023, that fell to 16 percent.”
“This continues a long-running decline,” he added. “I would be surprised if anyone engaged in the archaic activity of reading this essay were surprised by this data. Because the evidence is all around us.”
“On the train, the bus, or the subway, we see our fellow passengers hunched over their smartphones. In the past, at least some of them would have been clutching books. At home, we fight incessantly with our children over screen time, not least because we know it is taking the place of book time.”
Literacy — the ability to read and write — has declined over the past few decades. “When people stop reading, they stop being able to read. And I mean that, well, literally: Average adult skills scores for literacy compared with 2014 are down 12.4 points. … And when people stop being able to read — to make sense of the meaning of text on a page — they also lose the ability to make sense of the world.”
At stake here is nothing less than the fate of humanity, “given the intimate connection between the written word and civilization itself.”
The printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440, accelerated the spread of knowledge and literacy in Renaissance Europe. Gutenberg’s printing revolution influenced almost every facet of life in the centuries that followed, starting with the Protestant Reformation which leveraged the printing press to undermine the Catholic Church monopoly in information dissemination. Ever since, printed books have significantly expanded the knowledge we’ve all had access to, helping us generate much more knowledge and new kinds of disciplines.
“At first, the written word seemed to do remarkably well in the internet age,” wrote Fersuson. “The World Wide Web was essentially a distributed network for web pages largely composed of text, with a modest amount of illustrative art, linked together by text URLs. Blogging was writing. That continued to be the case throughout the rise of the network platforms. All Amazon ads rely on textual information. Google searches for text. Most Facebook posts were written.”
The universal reach and connectivity of the internet and World Wide Web ushered a historical transition from the industrial economy of the previous two centuries to a new kind of knowledge-based digital economy by enabling access to a huge variety of information and applications to anyone with a personal computer, an internet connection and a browser. Companies and public-sector institutions were thus able to engage in their core activities in a much more productive way.
Once more, we are in the midst of a historically transformative transition. The transition to the age of AI will be at least as big and consequential as the transition from the industrial economy to the internet-based digital economy of the past several decades. The machines of the industrial economy made up for our physical limitations, — steam engines enhanced our physical power, railroads and cars helped us go faster, airplanes gave us the ability to fly. But now, technology is being increasingly applied to activities requiring cognitive capabilities and problem solving intelligence that not long ago were viewed as the exclusive domain of human.
At a time when literacy is more important than ever to help us make sense of such a fast changing, complex world, three things are now rapidly eroding our connection to the written word, said Ferguson.
- “First, encouraged by the peculiar difficulty of the iPhone keyboard, there’s the rise of the emoji, which is in reality a return to the pictograph, a primitive pre-alphabetic form of written communication.”
- “Then comes the ascendancy of audio and video, epitomized by the proliferation of podcasts and the rise of TikTok. The important change here is the death of the script. … Only in the past decade has improvised chatter driven out carefully crafted lines of dialogue.”
- “Finally, though artificial intelligence remains largely text-based — because most prompts still have to be typed out — that is starting to change. Since the advent of reliable dictation software, inputs are increasingly spoken.”
“In short, we are moving rapidly toward a future where information will be shared via spoken words and images, not text, with computer code as the language spoken by computers to one another, intelligible only to a minority of humans.”
Ancient civilizations found it necessary to go beyond cave paintings and pictographs because “a society of any commercial complexity cannot function on the basis of emojis.” Without text, “it is hard to keep track of and communicate the rules that are necessary in a society of any complexity.” In addition, as literacy became more widespread, political participation became broader. Literacy may not have been intended to enable people to think for themselves. But that was its effect.
“If we gradually cease to base our social and political organization on the written word, it follows that there will be three consequences,” wrote Ferguson in conclusion.
- “First, we shall quickly be cut off from the heritage of all the great civilizations, as books are the principal repository of past thought. Books are the principal way a civilized person learns about the distinction between noble and ignoble conduct, for example.”
- “Second, we shall revert to the preliterary conflation of present and past, history and myth, individual and collective. The essence of the conspiracy theory is that it preys on the illiterate mind.”
- “Third, we shall quickly lose the ability to think analytically, because the crucial way our civilization has been transmitted from generation to generation is through the great writers, from whom we learn how to structure an argument so that it is clearly intelligible to others.”