Merryn Somerset Webb

I'm going to leave you to explain that.

But this intellectual shift led to a biological shift.

We had the author of that on the podcast a while back.

Such a good book.

Interesting, because we tend to think that, as you say, that's evolutionary and it should take thousands and thousands of years.

There should be generations of tiny little bits of change until the result appears.

But this can happen in no time at all.

And reading spread quite slowly, right?

Not everybody learned to read in a year, but everyone who can read now has access to AI immediately.

So it's much faster.

Yeah.

And you say as well that you now understand why Elon Musk bought Twitter.

Interesting.

OK, so it sounds when you put it like that, it sounds as though civilization itself will be transformed by these three things.

Okay, well, let's look at what happens when we allow it to happen passively, right?

So one of the things you look at is this MIT study that looked at brains of participants while they wrote essays.

So some of them wrote essays with absolutely no assistance at all.

Some were able to use search engines and some were able to use AI assistance.

And that was an experiment that showed us what will happen if we don't bring some focus into this conversation.

Okay, so as you would put it, you've made a trade, but you haven't recognized that you've made that trade.