Once more I have managed to miss my last Type M post day, so this time I decided that no matter how busy the summer is and how tired I am by the end of the day, I wouldn't miss my next Wednesday post. This one will be brief. As a child psychologist, I have posted before about my concern about the erosion of basic thinking skills as we rely more and more heavily on technology. This is especially true of young people whose brains are still developing. In the early years, up to about age 7, the brain is expanding rapidly, making more and more connections to make all kinds of learning possible. After that, however, it begins to concentrate on those connections that are most needed and used, while cutting back on the connections that seem unimportant. It's a use it or lose it era.
Two fundamental building blocks of cognition are attention and working memory, without which more complex thinking and analysis is impossible. Both have been seriously eroded by technologies providing superficial, rapid-fire stimulation. When was the last time you did mental math, when the calculator on your phone was readily at hand?
I first sounded the alarm when students began to use sources cribbed from the internet to cut and paste a jumble of ideas to produce an essay or project. I worried they would not learn to see the big picture and integrate ideas to see how they were connected. I also worried about the cellphone umbilical cord that tied young people too closely to their parents, so they didn't develop the self-confidence and problem-solving skills that come with doing things on their own.
With the advent of AI, I am afraid that an entire generation will grow up barely learning to think, or feel, for ourselves at all. Recently, I've read several articles that convey the problem for better than me, and I share two here. They are long but well worth the read (for those of us who can still read for in-depth understanding). There were many more but I can't offhand find the articles. But this is a brief glimpse of the dangers ahead.
https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/the-death-of-the-student-essayand
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