DRAFT: I Am Watching Your Minds Get Destroyed In Real Time

This morning I had a Teams meeting with a coworker. He’s an incredibly bright kid with whom I’ve worked directly for the last five years or so. He was trying to use a tool I wrote, and running into trouble with a feature I just added. Over the prior two weeks, he’d been in two meetings where I had explained this feature, and he had a sample file, written in JSON, in hand that had usage examples for the feature. When we looked at it together it was like he was having trouble seeing the example amidst the rest of the JSON content.

Never mind that I’m starting with an anecdote rather than hard data, there are six million other caveats here. Maybe he wasn’t paying attention in the meetings (though he actually asked for the first one). Maybe I am bad at explaining things (I am). There’s a host of inherent problems when you are trying to point out something systemic. Ofttimes the people who are not affected by the thing can’t see it. Always the people who are profiting from the systemic issue don’t want it seen and the evidence for it can be refuted by naming a hundred other possible causes. I’m sure all of these phenomena have been observed and named. I could go to AI to ask about them, but I don’t think it would make my writing better.

(Also, J., if you end up reading this: I still love you and I still think you’re incredibly smart. It’s only because you are such a normally sharp mind that I noticed something wasn’t right).

The other day on (I think) this platform I read a brief note from a non-fiction writer (I now can’t find it, so if this was you and you read this, please link to your post in the comments). What is happening to him is this: people are going to AI and getting them to summarize one of his books. Based on that summary, they develop some objection to one of his ideas and then go to post that objection on his Substack. Here is what he said about it: “These people think they are cyborgs, and their minds are gone.”

In the 1940s and ‘50s, cigarette companies started running ads featuring doctors; “More Doctors Smoke Camels,” and all that. It was that period in America where everybody knew that smoking was bad for human beings, but for various reasons they either didn’t want to know it or they didn’t want it known. And since hard data hadn’t yet been collected, there was a space in which you could subtly craft counter messaging. “Hey, doctors like smoking. And they know about health, right? So it can’t be that bad for you.”

The peddlers of AI came to their “More Doctors Smoke Camels” messaging almost immediately. They had to, because everybody who was working with, in, or anywhere near the education of young human beings knows that AI absolutely destroyed the ability of anyone to do that education. So there was that notion of cyborgs — that somehow getting AI to summarize books for you was going to make you smart, that AI “frees your brain to do higher order work”, or that Claude could make you a super coder¹. They more or less dropped the messaging when Corey Doctorow utterly demolished the idea, coining the notion of Reverse Centaurs. Now they tout the small percentage increases in the abilities of new models while financing them as if their growth were exponential.

If anything of this messaging remains, it’s the idea that, for educated adult humans, there’s some set of ways to use AI that is not harmful to their brains. And there well may be, but the ways that it is actively harmful to the human brain are utterly overwhelming them. Moreover, I don’t think there’s anybody out there reading this who doesn’t already know it. It’s that we’re still in some liminal state where everybody knows it, but we’re acting as if it’s not true². Instead, it’s as if in the 1940s and 50s, instead of running ads about what doctors smoked, we just went ahead and leveraged our entire economy on the future of tobacco industry profits³.

Again, I’m not saying anything new here. Everybody knows — even if they don’t know they know it — that AI is terrible for the human brain. What I’m here to say is that I can see it happening to you. Yes, you — the adult who perhaps thinks you’re getting more done because AI is summarizing your emails and meetings and essays and non-fiction books and writing your responses back for you.

I can see you having trouble engaging with the ideas I’m presenting when we’re at work, things you used to absorb with ease. I can see that you didn’t absorb anything beyond the barest outline of my last message, and that none of its actual content made its way into your mind.

I can see that you can’t read anymore. I can see that you can’t write.

I can see that you are forgetting how to actually engage with another human, face to face, in dialog. Even through the scourge of social media, you used to still be able to look up from your infinite scroll and do that for a minute or two, at least until the phone buzzed again. Your mind is deteriorating, right now in front of me, and it’s worse every day. You don’t seem to notice it happening. You are a healthy, adult human being and you are in visible, cognitive decline. And it scares the hell out of me. 

 

Infinite Thread

The thing I'm contemplating at the moment is how the human mind can adapt to the internet, what that mind might look like, and the forms in which it will engage with other minds doing the same thing. Let me first lay out some priors. As I mention elsewhere, a lot of these thoughts stem directly from the work of Naomi Alderman, a human currently offering her mind up on the internet to be engaged with, and with whose mind I am currently engaged. 

• Almost all of the intellectual engagement of thoughtful people on the internet is currently happening via old paradigms that were invented pre-internet. Writing and publishing, for instance. Or the addressing of an audience via broadcasting a voice (i.e. the paradigm of radio), or showing a talking head (i.e. the paradigm of tv). 
• Almost all of the engagement that is, to coin a phase, internet-y, is done with memes. It is easy to engage with other minds at very primitive levels with memes. It is very hard to engage with other minds at complex levels via memes. It might be -- it is probably -- possible. 
• The internet is an information technology like writing or the printing press (this is all Alderman now). The first two of those things caused seismic shifts in human existence. They were messy and violent. It took time for humans to adjust to them. 
• We are 30 years into humanity's widespread adoption of the internet. This technology is very new to us.
• The human mind has not yet adapted to the internet at all. 

And I guess I should qualify that last statement. The thoughtful human mind hasn't adapted to the internet at all. Lots of people have adapted themselves to the internet in ways you might called mindless. I don't need to expand on this statement, I don't think. Everyone knows what I am talking about, it's water we're all swimming in. In my darker moments I fear that there's a generation of human beings who were born more or less with the internet and whose minds are lost.

Let me here call out or name something -- what Isaac Newton referred to as, "standing on the shoulders of giants," and elsewhere is referred to as The Great Conversation. There doesn't seem to be any one name for it, but simply it is the process of human minds engaging with each other through time and space via (mostly) writing. Newton famously read Copernicus and Galileo and, even though he was separated from their minds by physically unbridgeable spacetime, was able to engage his mind with theirs. They wrote their shit down and he read it and did his own writing and human knowledge increased. This process has been, to this point in human history, incredibly painstaking and slow. It has required tremendously thoughtful humans to read and to write thoughtfully. And for the most part, though not always, it has been a tremendous boon to humans. 

The invention of writing was the first enabler of this process; that is, the process by which one human mind could engage with the thoughts of another human mind that wasn't physically present. We've long since lost the sense of what a shattering change this must have been. The invention of the printing press expanded this process in a spectacular manner -- suddenly the writings of humans were available to everyone. And these inventions didn't just alter the reach of engagement, they brought new methods and created new forms as well. There are kinds of thinking that a human can do if and only if they are writing. And kinds of thoughts a human mind can only think if they are reading. 

A question Alderman has asked in her most recent BBC Radio series Human Intelligence is how great historical thinkers did their thinking. It's a form of preamble to what I think is the great question of the internet. How did great historical thinkers engage with other human minds? I am absolutely not the first person to note that we need to dispose of the myth of the lone genius. But the existence of the internet makes the disposal of this myth a matter of urgency. The internet is a technology that allows the human mind to engage with other minds across time and space more or less instantly and on demand. We haven't even begun to understand the consequences of this. And we haven't even begun to imagine its potential.