The Thinking Machine That Makes Us Stop Thinking

AI excels at counterfeiting the human mind. If we’re not vigilant, it will think for us—leaving our own intelligence dormant, our creative impulse atrophied.

Already, much of our news is machine produced at news outlets like AP, Reuters, and Bloomberg, recapping the latest happenings in news, sports, and entertainment.

It can project us into videos, put words in our mouths, falsify who we are.

Writing in the Free Press, Tylan Cowen warns that within the next few years, AI will author most “of the words written in the United States.” He contends AI is much smarter than us, encyclopedic in scope, capable of writing our books and news for us.

New advances in technology assure its omnivorous takeover of much of everyday life. Indeed, we’re on the threshold of Ray Bradbury’s apocalyptic new world.

Bradbury foresaw a future of stupefying distraction—a civilization that traded reflection for amusement. With AI, his warning no longer reads as metaphor but as prophecy.

AI’s intelligence is borrowed; it knows only what its creators feed it. In the wrong hands, it becomes a megaphone for manipulation—its outputs polished, persuasive, and perilously biased.

AI cannot think for itself. What it spews out can prove toxic, prodigious in conspiracy, disseminating division that may spill into violence.

Algorithms are predictive. They know our wants and pile-on their overtures. Increasingly, they orchestrate our choices. Corporate driven, they offer a pecuniary bonanza servicing their interests.

AI outsources cognition. Invading scholarship, it’s become the campus Cliff Notes, shortcutting inquiry, analysis, and reasoning. It can summarize a complex Faulkner novel in milliseconds, replete with analysis. Why read at all? Why bother with the professor?

AI’s convenience comes at the price of serendipity: the unplanned discovery that alters our thinking, robbing us of the slow astonishment that once expanded the boundaries of our knowing.

AI proliferates plagiarism, the theft of another’s thought, masquerading as one’s own. It’s become the teacher’s nemesis: how do I know the student’s writing is their own?

AI homogenizes the writing act, making us all sound alike—the short, staccato sentences; simplified vocabulary; the annulling of the cumulative, crafted sentence, subtle in its syntactical variation, rhythms, and nuance. It’s the ultimate in dumbing down.

The heart of the matter, however, is AI’s largesse as a substitute for thought, straying into amnesia—a prosthetic for our inner murmurings.

—RJ