Derek Thompson

If you look at how artificial intelligence works,

was recently employed by the Mayo Clinic in radiology to see pancreatic cancer on average 2.4 years before a doctor could see it in a scan.

You cannot possibly argue that that is AI making people dumber.

That is clearly making us better, smarter as a species at seeing pancreatic cancer.

The use of technology, the use of artificial intelligence there is to supplement the human radiologist's eye to see pancreatic cancer.

So I don't, and that is obviously good.

So I don't want to represent my opinion here as being, and maybe Cal agrees, as being like, oh, all AI is bad.

Like,

But that's not the way that artificial intelligence is being used in high schools and college.

It's being used to cheat.

And to cheat at a scale that is keeping students from learning how to learn.

So I am very optimistic about how this technology is being employed in some industries, while at the same time, I think Cal is absolutely right that if you look at the use of artificial intelligence in high school and college, I see practically no reason to be optimistic about that generation's ability to learn, to think deeply,

to write by the time they graduate.

So technology is use.

There are some wonderful use cases of artificial intelligence, but within the education system today, like I think it is basically a tool for mass cheating that is in fact cheating students out of the ability to think in the long run.

Yeah.

If I was going to write like a magazine piece about this, I think the way that I would frame it, and I really like Cal's framing, so I'm borrowing this from him.

But I would say that for the last 10 to 20 years, we've been running this experiment of distraction in our schools.

Like we have very clear correlative that I think causal evidence that suggests that phones are an enormous distraction that's responsible for the global, not just US, but global decline in math scores, in literacy scores, and in other measures of one's capacity to maintain attention.

Now on top of this weapon of mass distraction, you add artificial intelligence, which is this extraordinary tool for synthesizing information, which allows students to cheat at an extraordinary scale that we know is happening in colleges and high schools.