The End of Thinking, Writing, and Reading? The Future in AI’s Hands
Introduction: The False Enemy at the Gates
We live in an age that is, on the one hand, fascinated by the vision of superintelligent machines and, on the other, terrified of it. Headlines shout about artificial intelligence that will take our jobs, surpass us in every field, and perhaps push us to the margins of history. In his provocative essay, "The End of Thinking," Derek Thompson puts forward a thesis that turns our attention away from gleaming server farms and toward our own minds. He argues that the real threat is not the spectacular rise of "thinking machines," but the quiet and progressive decline of "thinking people." We are so captivated by how technology might outpace us in the future that we fail to see how, today, it is already stripping us of our own fundamental abilities, step by step. This is not a story about a machine rebellion. It is a story about our voluntary surrender.
Diagnosis: The Silent Erosion of the Intellect
Thompson doesn't base his claims on futuristic speculation, but on hard data and observations that paint a picture of a systemic problem. This is not a single crack, but a slow erosion of the foundations of our civilization: reading, writing, and, most importantly, thinking.
1. The Death of Deep Reading
The primary victim of the digital age has become the ability to focus on a long, complex text. America's "National Report Card" (NAEP) is sounding the alarm—reading scores have hit a 32-year low. But the problem runs deeper than statistics. Even the brightest teenagers, the nation's future elites, have essentially stopped reading anything longer than a paragraph. Daniel Shore, the chair of Georgetown University's English department, notes with sadness that his students struggle to focus on even a single sonnet. Young people are arriving at elite universities without ever having read a single book in its entirety. The education system, by optimizing for tests, may have unwittingly contributed to the "chunking" of literature, teaching comprehension of short excerpts while discouraging engagement with a work as a whole.
2. Writing Shortcuts, or Thinking Outsourced
Writing has always been inextricably linked with thinking. It is not a process where we first think and then transfer finished thoughts to paper. The very act of writing is an act of thinking—of refining ideas, structuring arguments, and discovering new connections. Today, this crucial process is being massively outsourced. AI tools like ChatGPT have become for students what the calculator was for mathematics, but with far more dangerous consequences. One student admits bluntly: "At this point, college is just about how well I can use ChatGPT." Professors watch this trend with horror, warning that universities will soon be graduating alumni who are "essentially illiterate"—people with degrees but without the ability to formulate their own thoughts. As the editors of Nature magazine argue, outsourcing the entire writing process to AI deprives scientists of a key stage of their work: understanding what they have actually discovered and why it matters.
Consequences: A World Without Thinkers
The loss of these fundamental skills is not just an academic problem. It is a threat to the functioning of our entire society.
Thompson illustrates this with the example of medical students. Although they are encouraged to use AI as a powerful diagnostic tool, the students themselves are beginning to feel uneasy. "I'm worried these tools will erode my ability to make an independent diagnosis," says one. After a day of analyzing every case study with the help of AI, he had an unsettling realization: he "hadn't thought about a single patient independently." This is a picture of a future where the expert becomes merely a skilled interface operator, someone who is "slightly better at prompting AI than their patients."
The author invokes the concept of "time under tension" from weight training. Muscles grow not from simply lifting a weight, but from holding it under tension for a sufficient amount of time. The same is true for the mind. Deep thinking, which requires effort and time, is what builds our intellectual "muscles." By giving up this effort in favor of easy, instant answers from AI, we are condemning our minds to atrophy. In the face of the potential arrival of a super-brain, instead of strengthening our own abilities, "we're preparing for it... by lobotomizing ourselves."
Is There Still Hope? Time for an Intellectual Revolution
Despite the grim diagnosis, Thompson does not leave us without hope. He points out that culture often works on the principle of feedback—every action is followed by a reaction. Perhaps we are on the verge of a quiet revolution, a rebellion against lazy mental consumerism. The most common question he hears from worried parents is, "What should my child study in the age of AI?" His answer is clear: the specific field of study is not what matters. What is crucial is one universal skill—the very same one whose decline we are observing with such concern. The skill of deep, independent thinking.
Paradoxically, it is in the face of powerful machines that our human capacity for reflection, creativity, and critical analysis becomes more valuable than ever. The real challenge of our time, therefore, is not artificial intelligence. It is us—and our declining willingness to engage in intellectual effort. It is up to us whether we will let our minds fade in the glow of screens, or whether we will take up the fight for what makes us human.
Source: Based on the article "The End of Thinking" by Derek Thompson.
Aleksander
About the Author
Dyrektor ds. Technologii w SecurHub.pl
Doktorant z zakresu neuronauki poznawczej. Psycholog i ekspert IT specjalizujący się w cyberbezpieczeństwie.
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