Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Should the U.S. start bringing troops home from Europe? I worry a lot that this is where we were headed. Trump sort of signaled it a lot during his first term. And in my conversations with European friends, I have been telling them, be ready for this because I do not think we get through four years without the United States reducing its European footprint. I'm Jake Sullivan. I'm Jake Sullivan.
And I'm John Finer, and we're the hosts of The Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, we debate whether the U.S. should draw down its true presence in Europe, and we break down the latest developments in the Iran war. The episode's out now. Search for and follow The Long Game wherever you get your podcasts.
Megan Rapinoe here. This week on A Touch More, I'm talking to my good friend, former soccer player and current soccer analyst, Lori Lindsey, about all things NWSL, the past, the present, and the future. Plus, I'm taking a look at the athletes who crushed at the Met Gala and Angel Reese's firm boundaries with the media.
Check out the latest episode of A Touch More wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube.
Today's number... $100,000. That's how many dollars it reportedly cost to get one ticket to the Met Gala. Meanwhile, the price of a table was $350,000, or as attendees call it, half a facelift. If money is evil, then that building is hell. The show goes on! Get back in there and watch the show! Show! Welcome to Profiteer Markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is May 12th.
Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The major indices all climbed, led by a rally in chip stocks. The S&P and the Nasdaq both hit new records. Those gains came despite President Trump's rejection of Iran's proposal to end the war. He also said the ceasefire was on, quote, massive life support.
Brent crude climbed higher as hopes for peace faltered, and the yield on 10-year treasuries rose. Okay, what else is happening? Since the 1800s, every generation has been smarter than their parents, except for Gen Z. That is what neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath told Congress last month. Today, 90% of college students and 84% of high schoolers use AI in class or for their homework.
And according to OpenAI's own data, one of the most common use cases for AI is writing. Meanwhile, a recent study found that AI tool usage among business students was associated with weaker critical thinking skills. And this data raises an important question. And that is, what do we lose when we outsource our work and our thinking to AI? After all, 900 million people use ChatGPT every week.
In other words, is AI making all of us dumber? Now, you might remember that we discussed this question last week. We've been investigating this question a little bit more. But today we want to bring in two experts who are thinking about this, who understand these issues. So we're going to do something a little bit different.
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Chapter 2: What are the potential downsides of AI on human intelligence?
Well, I figured out with a forklift, it'll be a lot easier. I don't have to lift the weight myself. You're actually being counterproductive to the actual goal, which is strengthening the cognitive muscle to get stronger. So no, I do think this is not a technology that's making us better at critical thinking.
It's allowing us to sidestep the hard activities that previously we used to make our brain stronger. The product, the benefit being sold by this product is convenience in the moment, not a stronger brain or stronger ability to think.
Stay tuned for more of this panel right after the break. And by the way, we are heading out on tour at the end of the month. So for more info and to get tickets to a show near you, head to profgmarketstour.com.
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Chapter 3: How is AI currently being used by students in education?
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That's Hostinger.com slash TheProfG. Promo code TheProfG for an extra 20% off. This week on Net Worth and Chill, I'm joined by Tank Sinatra, the meme king, with over 15 million followers across Tank's Good News, Influencers in the Wild, and his personal account.
Tank is breaking down what the meme economy really is, how much a single sponsored post pays, why major brands are throwing serious money at jokes, and how meme culture—think Preparation H— We're back with Profiteer Markets.
So if we all agree that this technology is making us dumber, and it seems that it's... I mean, I think that. I'm not sure who disagrees with that at this point. I think it's pretty clear to us. I mean, Derek... Let's like model this out, game theory it out. Where does this go in terms of the economy?
I mean, if we are dependent on AI, but none of us can really come up with original ideas and we can't think critically about issues, do you think that that steers the trajectory of our economy in perhaps a different direction?
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. 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.
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Chapter 4: What concerns do experts have about AI's impact on cognitive fitness?
You prove in real time that you are the author of that paper, that you understand the work that you did. And I just think that more education, if we really want to get around the cheating epidemic, probably has to slurp in this Oxford model or this dissertation model because it's much harder to cheat in an oral exam.
That's a really interesting point.
Cal, do you agree? No, that has to be right. I mean, this is what's happening in academia right now. It's a combination of the Oxford model and what I've long been advocating for, which is the explicit discussion and promotion of the ability to aim your mind's eye towards complicated topics as the goal of school.
And it's something that we should be talking about starting at grammar school and moving all the way through the university system. That we are here not just to get content and reproduce content on test, But to teach our mind to be comfortable thinking, and that's a frame through which to see almost every activity we do.
I would also throw into this, I think specificity is a really important point we made earlier. So I'm just going to throw in a sort of specificity constraint here. What we're really talking about, if we're going to use my terminology, AI is the wrong term. That's way too broad. That includes things like the Cleveland Clinic or Mayo Clinic model that Derek was talking about.
That model, for example, has nothing to do with a large language model like the type you would see produced by the frontier AI companies, right? This is a prediction model that's custom trained on labeled data sets of radiology scans. We've been doing this since the 90s and been making slow and steady progress.
Like these sort of AI models that are very utilitarian and useful aren't new, aren't currently experiencing a massive exponential takeoff in capabilities, but often they're The frontier AI companies will launder the results from these non-LLN models and sort of mix in with what they're doing.
But what we're really talking about here is large language model-based tools, and in particular, using those for the production of written text or in some sense to sort of aid thinking. And that's exactly where we get to all the problems in the academic setting that we've been talking about.
How big of a problem do you consider this in terms of like a national economic scale? Because, I mean, there's one side of this, which is like, you know, we want to protect our kids. It's important that our kids have fulfilling, interesting school experiences. They get a good education, et cetera, which I'm sure we all agree. But then there's also another side to it, which is like,
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Chapter 5: How does AI affect our ability to think critically?
You learn about something, and then you're able, through your learning about it, to make it simple and make it effective. If you are cheating yourself out of all these tests, you're cheating yourself out of the ability to become rich and successful.
And so one thing that I'm afraid of is not just that these people who are cheating are going to lose out to the Chinese or whatever, the Finnish or the Danes, maybe they are, maybe they aren't. They're going to lose out to people who can think, who are doing the work, who can sit with ideas, who do have and are building cognitive time and attention.
And so I just think that a world in which you have a generation of people with extraordinary expectations of material success, but underdeveloped abilities to actually achieve that success, that just seems like you're setting up a generation for unbelievable disappointment, anxiety, and depression. So, you know, this goes, I think, not just to, you know, the concept of national greatness, U.S.
versus China, although maybe it touches on that. It goes to, like, you know, what do we want from our life? Like, what do people who want to be rich and successful, what should they want from their life? They should want the ability to... The ability to sit with discomfort, to work hard, to enjoy complicated problems, to love thinking through them because that's where your money is made.
If you lose that, you really lose out on this ability to achieve what is the new American dream.
I guess the reason that I'm so interested in the economics angle is because I feel like the argument against what we're saying is that it's sort of this Luddite argument that you're anti-technology, anti-progress. And I think the thing that really resonates for me to your point, Derek, is if you have a generation of people
who have been trained since their infancy to take shortcuts, to not sit with ideas, to not work hard, to just scroll, scroll, and kind of live this sort of fleeting imaginary version of success, and you never actually build the tools or the abilities to actually go out there and achieve it, then ultimately we'll have an entire generation, an entire nation of basically lazy, non-thinking losers who can't really get anything done, who can't really come to a consensus and make decisions and build things.
I just wonder if that is the argument that needs to be made to those who would be pushing against this argument. I mean, there are certainly going to be people out there who would say, Cal is just afraid of technology. Derek thinks AI is bad. They're sort of anti-progress. They're anti-innovation. And I wonder if they're missing something.
They're missing a productivity angle, which is that if you have a generation, I mean, an entire society of dumb people, then just economically speaking, GDP is going to go down. I feel like that's the only outcome. Derek, does that resonate, I guess?
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