Is AI Making Us Dumb?
profgmedia.substack.comNo matter how you slice this apple, it's going to be lopsided. The real problem is that true learning is hard, ugly work, and the vast majority of people simply don't have the grit to choose friction over shortcut. Lord knows, I wouldn't have put in the grinding effort to learn how to code if I could have just bot-it. To make matters worse, you have advertisers masquerading as influencers pushing the notion: if you're not shipping 10 features a day, you'll be left behind. It's a perfect damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.
I've been able to learn about niche topics far more after LLMs have become available. Reading through less materials, lets me learn about things right away. I'd say the same thing can happen for the students. The less friction to learning things usually makes things easier to learn. That leads the curious minds to more knowledge. That's a good thing.
Yes
Q: Is AI Making Us Dumb?
A: No.
From the substack:
We can’t fully blame AI. After all, it’s only been with us for the last four years. This decline began with the internet and got worse with smartphones.
"We can’t fully blame X" Is a different proposition from "X is not causing Y".
The first only says that several things cause Y, it does not exclude X from being not one of them. Or even from being the latest and worst one. It's a qualified yes, not a no.