Floating on my bicycle in a dream of a rural road, behind me came a man in a whistling electronic cyclist, going fast, he went to some important place. I thought at that speed, 25 miles per hour, I estimated, and with the dusk meeting, he risked to hit a bear that would quickly eat him the bicycle. But there is not so much luck.
I saw him later on the crest of the hill he had climbed. He built in circles and went down again while I rested. The hill had been difficult for me. As you weaken with the dependence of the machineI murmured for me I get strongER. There is a certainty in the world of cycling: traditional cyclists will survive electronic cyclists, which are silly to renounce physical benefits, spiritual joys, freedom and independence of a mechanism driven by humans.
Our machine dependence, of course, is growing at an exponential pace, as Ia enters wide use. Yes Internet, by author Nicholas CarrIt has made us stupid, the AI promises to become even more stupid. Carr has argued, correctly, that with its endless distractions and fragmented structure, its flashing rabbit holes, its emphasis on constant speed and change (between subjects, links, pages, images, etc.), Internet causes cognitive damage, a brain crash so that we are less able to reflect and meditate, think in length and complex, to deepen. Your 2010 book “The Shallows“ It remains the most important research on technological immanence and its consequences from the “Neil Postman Technopoly“ (1992).
The AI now comes, and we face a new disaster for human cognition, since the perspective of unbeaten imbecility by artificial intelligence is confirmed in the study after the study of the use of great language models such as Chatgpt.
A researcher analyzed the “future of critical thought” in a saturated environment of LLM and found “Significant negative correlation between the frequent use of the AI tool and critical thinking skills.” The breakdown of critical thinking was due to the obvious factor of the increase in “cognitive discharge” that applications such as chatgpt are offered. Instead of staying in shape by doing hard work, the atrophy of the brain “muscle”, since it allows the machine to transport the load. There were Echoes of Car in the conclusion of the study, which pointed out that the dependence of AI can “reduce the participation of users in deep and reflective thinking processes.” It was discovered that younger people are particularly vulnerable, exhibiting “lower critical thinking scores compared to older participants.” Children, adolescents and young adults, in other words, are the most in danger of technology. (Think about that, adults who are earning money with seller technology and proselytism: they are hurting children).
A team from the University of Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon Published similar findings In February. The use of “generative AI”, that is, large language models, can “inhibit critical commitment to work”, reduce skills sets “for independent problem solving” and, this should be so obvious that it is not necessary to say, it leads to “long -term excess in the tool.” In this narrative, AI is a cerebral narcotic; The heavier the use is, the greater the addiction, the more damage it is done.
Finally, there is the study of the MIT published in June, entitled “Your brain in chatgpt. “In the task of writing an essay, the study participants were divided into three groups: only for the brain, those who completed the trial without help for the search for machines; distributed networks; the search engine users showed a moderate commitment; and LLM users showed the weakest connectivity.”
The cognitive activity decreased with each increase of greater use of the machine. To reiterate: the more technology dependent to elaborate your thoughts, the less your mental performance will be, the more stupid you will get. And the stupid endures over time. “For four months, LLM users had a constant performance at the neural, linguistic and behavior level. These results generate concerns about long -term educational implications of confidence in LLM.”
Between February and April, the number of chatgpt users worldwide increase from 400 million to 800 million (and this from 50 million in January 2023). In the United Kingdom, the proportion of students who did not use chatgpt or other LLM collapsed From 47% last year to 12% this year, only one tenth of the students surveyed remained against the machine. In mid -2024, almost 90% of students in Harvard They were using LLM for their studies. More than 70% of American adults regularly report that they use AI, and a third says they use it every day.
Our cognitive disaster develops as if it were the path of the world, such as the sun on the horizon and the light that covers the earth, inevitable, irreversible, the nature of things. This can be so, given that leaning before the technological God is inherent in industrial civilization, an expression of the fanatic adoration of innovation that does not question in our society.
Meanwhile, he reminds me that the electronic bicycle pilot that happens to us with his artificial speed is day by day becoming a flaccid disaster. The few who retain their strength and independence, who refuse to bend the knee to the machine, will only become more powerful, more intelligent, perhaps to win a long -term Darwinian career, when the weak and servile dependents of the AI will be eliminated after the machine system fails.
Christopher Ketcham is writing a book about environmental revolt against industrialism. He is the author, more recently, of “this land: how jeans, capitalism and corruption are ruining the American west.”
