Don't Let AI Make You Dumber: The Importance of Reading and Thinking

People in general are drastically decreasing their reading ability (or willingness to do so). It’s an interesting paradox of this time we live in: the one thing people need do correctly these days, is reading and writing. Yet with AI, people think they’re free from having to do so properly. They’re not.

If this image made you laugh, it’s probably cos you’re complicit. So watch out.

Every other digital interface that’s not human to human, will slowly pivot towards a single type of input: natural language input, and natural language output. Mostly 1.

Understanding requirements, properly summarizing, and synthesizing content have never been more relevant. You can’t really prompt your way to the end of existence without correctly expressing what’s in your mind.

When you get a long response from an LLM, understanding and reading it is what really yields the best results. Helping, and guiding the system.

With AI, everyone on the planet now has the privilege of being able to interact, create, learn, and communicate in ways they could’ve never imagined before.

“Soon the most common coding language will be English”

Yet some are using this to save themselves the 20’ it takes to follow up with a personalized email. To do a rough research and dump their thoughts on paper. Think through them. Structure their thoughts. And only then write.

Well let me tell you something, you’re not saving time on your reading, or wriitng, your quitting thinking. The exercise of communicating, or reading and trying to comprehend what was on someone else’s mind, that’s what you’re missing out on, and what you’re not practicing. And that my friend is what will eventually make us dumber as a species. It won’t be AI.

If you made it all the way down here, you’re probably thinking, why the AI generated title? And you’re right to ask this question. I don’t care about engagement, so some of my stuff is AI generated. It’s the stuff I don’t care too much about

Footnotes

  1. There will be other kinds of output, like Spreadsheets, Code, Calendar updates, and so on and so forth. ↩