A few weeks back (The Primacy of Reading) I shared this quote:
“Social media has evolved from text to photo to video to streams of text, photo, and video, and finally, it seems to have reached a kind of settled end state, in which TikTok and Meta are trying to become the same thing: a screen showing hours and hours of video made by people we don’t know. Social media has turned into television.”
It’s a quote from an article entitled Everything Is Television – A Theory of Culture and Attention by Derek Thompson that he posted last October. I shared those words as they relate to the importance of reading and more specifically how people are reading a lot less than they have since the early and heady days of formal education with the associated skills and disciplines. Thompson’s observations (which are grounded in empirical data) help us understand why we have seen such a sharp decline in both reading and writing over the last several decades.
But in another article published two weeks earlier in September, Thompson writes about AI and its assault not just on reading and writing, but on thinking. He begins with the meteoric rise of AI and the great concern over job loss as people’s job skills become redundant. This seems often to be the main concern that people have with AI, the economics of it. But Thompson quickly pivots to a much graver concern, and thus the ominous title of his article – The End of Thinking.
There has been a steady decline in reading and writing activity since the genesis of television, a trend that has continued to accelerate for the past few decades with the development of the internet. But as Thompson observes, with the advent of AI we are seeing an exponential acceleration in the decline of educational disciplines.
“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.
It is generally understood that no technology is inherently bad. Even with AI, it is not difficult to showcase its constructive powers. I consulted AI, “Why the internet is making us stupid.” And in typical fashion, far less than a second later, here was the response:
The internet is contributing to perceived declines in cognitive abilities by fostering a “shallow” consumption of information, characterized by constant distractions, reduced attention spans, and a shift from deep, critical thinking to rapid, passive scanning. The constant connectivity encourages reliance on digital, external memory over internal knowledge retention, resulting in weakened critical reasoning and increased cognitive overload.
I don’t think many would question the veracity of this explanation and the comprehensive nature of the response is impressive. And of course, AI didn’t just give that succinct overview but expanded on it point by point as follows:
Key Reasons for Cognitive Decline
- Reduced Attention Span: The “digital environment” of constant links and rapid information consumption makes sustained focus difficult.
- “Pancake People” Phenomenon: Coined by Richard Foreman, this refers to being spread wide and thin as we connect with a vast network of information, losing “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance”.
- Transactive Memory Reliance: As users rely on search engines as an external, “transactive memory” source, the brain loses its capacity to store and recall information internally.
- Information Overload & Multitasking: Continuous, rapid, and overwhelming flows of data prevent deep cognitive consolidation. Multitasking leads to poorer work quality and higher cognitive fatigue.
- Rewiring Neural Circuits: The brain’s neural pathways are changing to prioritize skimming and scanning over deep reading and reflection.
- Diminished Deep Thinking: The “efficiency” of quick, online answers minimizes the effort needed to synthesize information, which can impair problem-solving skills.
Impact on Thinking and Brain Function
- Techno-brain Burnout: Prolonged online use can result in feelings of fatigue, irritability, and decreased concentration.
- Loss of Creativity: A shift toward “systematized knowledge” often occurs at the expense of original thought and creativity.
- Short-term Information Processing: Data is rarely held long enough in the brain to form rich, long-term connections.
- Surface-level Understanding: The structure of web browsing, including hyperlinks, can disrupt the ability to follow a sustained, complex argument.
O, the irony! Employing AI to critique itself!
So, it’s arguably not the technology but how we use it that is the issue. Web pioneer and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen suggests (in an article entitled Why AI Will Save The World) that “every child will have an AI tutor that is infinitely patient,” “every person will have an AI assistant,” “productivity growth throughout the economy will accelerate dramatically” and “creative arts will enter a golden age.”
That would be the utopian version of forward thinking on this! And there are those who suggest digital technology is merely changing, not destroying our cognitive abilities. But the data appears to support the observation that what we are seeing is what Nicholas Carr refers to as a more shallow form of human intelligence. Carr’s 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains sounded an alarm on several fronts and his concerns have since been substantiated by research involving our attention spans, memory, and our ability to empathize with others.
You may want to check out Derek Thompson’s work where he shows how performance in reasoning and problem-solving tests is declining. And you can also see Peter Biles research that I referenced in my previous post where he explores the question, “Are We Experiencing a Universal Cognitive Decline?” The data appears to be rather conclusive – we are.
And if it’s not the technology but how we use it that is the issue, how are we using it? Or is it using us?
Wyatt Graham is not an AI doomer. He sees universities graduating students, it seems en masse, who are cheating their way to a degree employing AI to do their work for them. But Wyatt wonders where it will lead us. That’s the big question isn’t it. No one knows the future really (except for the Bible, and maybe George Orwell!) but there are those like Wyatt who have hope. The catchy title of his recent article – AI Won’t Destroy Education. Just the Opposite. At Least I Hope So – puts forward the argument that education was already in big trouble long before AI appeared on the scene.
My argument is that AI will not make education fail; it already has. Not because universities have churned out degrees (although we might ask what the point of this is) and not because they equipped students with skills for the workforce (this is good), but because we misunderstood the nature of education.
Could this be a ‘teachable moment’ in history, a fork in the road where we make a right turn and universities return to their original calling to educate instead of being the ‘degree mills’ they have morphed into? Wyatt goes on to make the case for what he calls the true nature of education – character formation. Here he draws on comments from Derek Schuurman. Schuurman argues that “… the advances in AI will expose the limited value of a strictly utilitarian education. It turns out that many technical and practical skills are the most likely to be displaced by AI” but “We could be standing on the threshold of a renaissance that recovers what education ought to be: the formation of a person.”
The purpose of education – to make us better people. It’s a novel thought today. But as much as our minds need good education, our souls might need it even more. As researchers pour over the contemporary cultural landscape, many share Paul Kingsnorth’s observations about the ‘hollowing out of humanity’ Kingsnorth published his book Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity in September of last year. He says that it is our very souls that are at stake.
Is Kingsnorth right? I hear the soul is making a comeback in some academic circles! Are we using the internet or is it using us? Because technology is immensely beneficial. And it can kill us.
“More than twenty-four thousand minutes of new user video is uploaded to YouTube every minute of every day.” (Andrew Wilson, December 2025)
Maybe we should take the time to think hard and long about that.