Our Children In Cognitive Collapse
AI is dangerous for developing minds.
I may not mention Vanessa Windgårdh very often, but I listen to her to stay abreast of changes our society will face due to technology. This isn’t the first thing I’ve seen about children showing up not just unable to read, but lacking basic thinking skills.
I think her grim assessment in spot on - people are becoming addicted to AI, they’re literally outsourcing their thinking to it. Do this with a mind that’s still developing - those twenty five and under - and this will cause harm that will be VERY difficult to remediate later in life. The techbros are fine with a nation that’s utterly dependent on the gadget in their pocket as a cognitive prosthetic.
Observations:
I spent six of my first nine months in a half body cast in a state orphanage, which thankfully did a decent job on my hip dysplasia. I am faceblind, unable to interpret how people feel by looking at them, I have difficulty recognizing people, and there are other issues that make me notably “different” from everyone else. So I get at a deep, personal level what it is to be damaged in an irreparable fashion as a child.
I dealt with some of that social media addiction stuff in the tweens. I bricked my last postpaid phone in 2014 and spent the next five years not even having a phone with me when I left the house. That discipline has slid due to ride share and stuff, but it’s not at all unusual for me to leave for work in the city for the day with my phone turned off and to get home twelve hours later without having turned it on at all. This intentional disconnect makes me an oddball on the train - I pretty consistently see 75% - 90% of all others in my car having their face glued to a screen.
I suffered through nearly two decades of undiagnosed MCAS, an immune disorder that will at the slightest digestive provocation steal your brain away for hours on end. I had to have Claude Desktop as a cognitive prosthetic in order to self diagnose and begin to improve. Now I use Antigravity with Claude’s Sonnet/Opus models to do software development for my startup.
And for those duties, I supervise the model’s progress much more closely than what I see from the various YouTube educators I follow. The model does not have a computer science education, or a dozen years of Python background, or a lifetime of experience in handling distributed systems. There are things I will spot and fix almost immediately that the model will not be able to resolve, no matter how patiently I watch it struggle.
So for me LLMs are a cognitive prosthetic … as well as a goad to keep doing things by hand. If there’s something that’s going to happen once, I’ll let the machine get it. If it’s something I expect to encounter regularly, I absolutely INSIST on knowing how to do it by hand. Most people are not going to be so disciplined.
Conclusion:
Vanessa mentions that AI usage, and more importantly screen time itself are becoming class distinguishers. The people with money are keeping their children from developing these bad habits. If I had a say in how a child were being raised in the 2020s they’d probably get no more than a flip phone to carry with them. That’s enough to call mom and dad for a pickup, without destroying their developing minds.
We’re past 1984, this is some Brave New World grade dystopia. The lower class embryos will be intentionally stunted and made to conform.
Speaking as a state orphanage leftover I must say I am not impressed with this plan.