The internet made us stupid. AI promises to make it worse

As the number of AI users increases, researchers can see the future of critical thinking, and it’s not good

- CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM GUEST CONTRIBUTOR

IN AN MIT study released in June, participants' cognitive activity dropped as they used more AI.

FLOATING ALONG on my bicycle on a daydream of a country road, up behind me came a man on a hissing e-bike, going fast, headed somewhere important. I thought at that speed — 25 miles an hour, I estimated — and with dusk gathering, he risked hitting a bear that would promptly eat him and the bike. But no such luck.

I saw him later at the crest of the hill that I'd climbed. He whizzed in circles and headed back down while I rested. The hill had been a tough one for me. As you weaken with dependence on the machine, I muttered to myself, I grow stronger. There is one certainty in the cycling world: Trad bikers will outlive e-bikers, who are fools to give up the physical benefits, the spiritual joys, the liberty and independence of a human-powered mechanism.

Our machine dependence, of course, is growing at an exponential rate, as AI comes into wide usage. If the internet, per author Nicholas Carr, has made us stupid, AI promises to make us even stupider. Carr has argued, correctly, that with its endless distractions and fragmented structure, its flashing rabbit-holes, its emphasis on speed and constant switching (between subjects, links, pages, images, etc.), the internet causes cognitive damage, a rewiring of the brain so that we're less able to ponder and meditate, to think at length and complexly — to go deep. His 2010 book “The Shallows” remains the most important inquiry into technological immanence and its consequences since Neil Postman’s “Technopoly” (1992).