Derek Thompson

Pay attention to your own use of time.

When you ask artificial intelligence to summarize an article, or to summarize a paper, or God forbid, to summarize an entire book,

do you understand that article, that paper, or that book as well as if you had read it?

Of course not.

Okay, now maybe you could argue that, all right, well, I saved time because now, rather than read that one book, which might have taken me 10 hours, I can summarize 15 books, and that'll take me sort of 10 hours to process or something.

Well, even there, you're engaging at such a shallow level with each book that I'm not sure you really understand the degree to which they agree and disagree with each other, but also what you're depriving yourself from the inability to read anything for more than five or 10 minutes at a time.

And that is a skill that leads over time to the ability to make the sort of deep connections that I think are the basis of all true insightful thinking.

So I absolutely think that the risk here is really, I guess, as I described it, sort of of at least two layers.

One, that you're depriving yourself of the experience of truly understanding something that you think you're trying to understand.

And number two, that you fall out of a habit that is necessary to think deeply in the future.

And to Cal's sort of maybe first point to end there because you're going a chronologically, um,

you know, we're looking at things like the Flynn effect and we're looking at things like test scores over time.

Well, if we're depleting the inability of fifth graders and sixth graders to think and they continue to use AI in seventh grade and eighth grade and through 12th grade and through college, that's not just one year of losing the practice of doing deep reading and deep thinking.

Now we're talking about a decade of

a formative decade that you've chosen to essentially not work on the kind of muscles.

I do like this fitness metaphor, not work on the kind of muscles that are so necessary in the long run for understanding something deeply to be smart about it.

So absolutely, I think the calzone is something.

Let me try to take this question at a really high level of abstraction, and then I'm going to zoom in on some specifics.

I think that technology is use.

How the effect of AI is exquisitely dependent on how we use it.