Ideas - With a decline in reading is our capacity to think eroding?

Episode Date: February 19, 2026

Thanks to AI, it's easier than ever to avoid reading books — but that convenience may come with a cost. IDEAS explores how our digital landscape, coupled with the decline of reading, is changing the way we think.If you like this episode, listen to our podcast with Geoffrey Hinton, the 'godfather of artificial intelligence' who says AI must develop empathy and 'maternal instincts' or we risk human extinction.

This program is brought to you in part by Spex Savers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan.

Book at Spexavers.cavers.cautors.com. I exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. How would you define what it means to think well? To think well. Hmm. Um, um, ha.

In the internet age, it can be hard to stay focused on any one thing. or even to know what's worth paying attention to. Many of us remember what it felt like to notice our own attention spans shrinking. None of us can escape the acceleration of daily life. As that acceleration accelerates, thinking can begin to feel like a chore. Interest in voluntary reading has declined. People are feeling that they no longer have the same, even desire to become immersed in what they're reading.

And without that desire, we might be tempted just to offload it all, to someone or something else. It's very easy for us to farm out our thinking to the machine. But the imperative to think well remains as essential as ever. I think there's that question of what parts of your thinking are good to delegate to someone else and what parts have to be thunk for yourself.

I worry that we're not asking ourselves Well, what do I think? This episode of Ideas explores the decline of reading and the art of thinking well in the digital age. How much time do you spend thinking about thinking? Hmm. Producer Annie Bender takes it from here. Probably more than average, to be honest.

I've always liked arguing. So when I was a very little kid, my brother and I would be at home my parents on Sunday would be watching the McLaughlin group. Bush should be out in front. Bush is out in front. He's going to be moron. John, John.

What's rubbish to George Bush's a little bit. What absolute rubbish. Which was a political news show with a bunch of people arguing about the issues and questions of the day and what would happen next. And we liked it so much that I would kind of toddle into the room as a preschooler to sit down as it started to yell with John McLaughlin, issue one from the living room couch. Leah Sargent is a writer and policy analyst based in Washington, D.C. She's also a seasoned debater. I think increasingly in some competitive debate circuits, people chase the measures of victory rather than meaningful debate,

which is why you hear the competitive debaters who learn to speak really fast with no breaths because they're trying to put as many arguments on the board as possible. That win-lose style of argument will sound familiar to anyone who uses social media. But as a student at Yale University, Leah discovered a completely different approach to debating. When I went to college, I joined the Yale Political Union, which was kind of an unusual debating society, in that unlike competitive debate, where you're assigned sides at random, and it's about how well can you defend an arbitrarily chosen side of a question, you only, in our group, argue things you actually think. And in competitive debate, there are judges who are kind of scoring you on how well you bring out points or answer points and might even just tally down how many arguments you do raise, how many do you rebut to try and figure out who won.

But in our form of debate, there are no judges at all. And no one will give you a prize for giving a really good speech at almost any debate. What the prize is is that you might persuade someone to live their life differently. And not because they tallied up your answers and disagreements. But because you said something that rooted deeply within them and they decided, I can't go on living the way I used to live. I have a better option or I realized what I was doing was impossible or incoherent. And now I have to shake up my whole life. Or, of course, that might happen to you.

How often did people persuade each other? No, not all the time. But it was definitely expected that it happened sometimes. And when I was president of our debating organization and got to give the beginning of the semester address on why are we here, what are we doing, you know, I listed various impressive people who had graduated from Yale on various sides of the political divide. And I said, you know, you might be sitting next to the next so and so and so and so and so. And this is your chance to stop them. Wow, that is very high stakes. I mean, doesn't get higher stakes than that, really, when you're thinking about future impact.

For context, Leah's debating group has featured the likes of Ronald Reagan, Joe Biden, and Milton Friedman. Those are high stakes. But regardless of who we're talking to, it's worth thinking hard about our arguments, because the way we argue reflects the way we think. I think thinking well is about receptivity to the outside world, not just the outside world physically, but the outside world of ideas of what's, really true. You know, my debate experience gave me a lot of gifts that I draw in in my day-to-day life, at work and at home. And part of it is just kind of habit of working to see something through someone else's perspective. And you're ultimately not just trying to see what can I do, what can I contribute, but to say, am I correct? And when I'm not correct, what is going to help me notice that I'm wrong and change my mind? Hmm. And what do you personally find most challenging

about that process of thinking well. I think one of the big things is that it takes time. It can't happen at the pace you'd like it to happen at. And I think that's particularly frustrating in disagreements interpersonally where you desperately want someone to change their mind, not just on a political issue, but a personal issue where within your family. And even when you're right,

none of that kind of gives you a guarantee that you can get someone to notice your right on the timeline you want. Now, there's a Korean philosopher in Berlin, name Han Bionchil. Han is actually his last name, so he would say Bionchil Han. But he has been writing book after book about time, among other things. And he says that we are so, if you will, immersed in a culture that is accelerated to the point where one experience follows another with no time to linger in between. And the lack of lingering, I equate, that to the lack of attention given to thought, reflection, affect, et cetera.

UCLA neuroscientist Marianne Wolfe knows a great deal about the time required to think well, and just how little of our time we're devoting to it. The attention economy affects us all. And it affects me, you know, at the end of a day of being on the screen, do I want to read something that's difficult? Are you kidding me? I am really tired. I am weary. I'm just like every one of you out there. Professor Wolfe is a world-renowned expert in the science of the reading brain, and she argues that reading is essential to the process of thinking well. Reading propels writing. Writing propels reading. Writing and reading propel thought.

This is the equation, and if we don't respect it, it will short-circuit the brain. I don't know about you, but reading is not something I've had a lot of time for recently. Oh, no. You're all done? Yeah. I returned to work not long ago from maternity leave, and I'll be the first to admit that I've had some doubts about the quality of my own thinking. Obviously, it's hard to sink into a novel with an 18-month-old around, but I struggled even when my baby was a newborn.

I'm really curious to kind of hear your response to a feeling that I had that whole year that I was off, where I was reading articles, reading books, and somehow yet at the end of the day, never feeling like I'd retained very much of it? Retained it, yeah. And it's so easy to kind of write that off as parenting brain fog. It's not. It's a universal phenomenon, Annie, that people are feeling that. that they no longer have the same even desire to become immersed in what they're reading.

We are physiologically programmed to bleed over a style of reading according to what dominates our day. Now, what dominates most of us are screens. And so the skimming, if you will, lack of immersive reading, if that's, dominating your day, that's going to actually dominate your style no matter what medium. And so is the propensity that you're describing to skim text derived from the content of the screens? Is it only because of the type of stuff we're reading on the screen that this is happening? No, no. If only it were that simple. According to Marianne Wolfe, the simple fact that.

that we're reading on screens is making it harder to immerse ourselves in a text. The most basic way of thinking about it is skimming versus deep reading possibilities. The screen is very good for helping us be able to bifurcate our attention in two shallow ways, or maybe three shallow ways. We do the social media.

We scam the advertisement. All these things we're allowed to do because we're only, only skimming. And so when you, Annie, were on your phone all the time, it's efficient, it's right there, but it actually disallows you to have that, not just the sense of being immersed, but the reality of expending more time and thought. And we are on our phones all the time. It's not hard to draw a line from the individual cost of those distractions. to our collective thinking habits.

I've been having this feeling lately that humanity might not on the whole be thinking all that well these days. Are you feeling that way? Well, I want to start with they're not reading that well. But yes, because the two are definitely linked, it has an effect that we're not reading very well on reading. Sorry, on thinking. Adrienne van der Weill is an emeritus professor at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society. So yes, I think your sense that we're not thinking that well is probably justified.

I think, you know, the general hecticity of the internet, the instantaneousness of connections and conversation, the search for novelty, the sense of ephemeral. typified by the infinite scrolling we do. We're always looking for new information, more excitement, which means that we don't really take the time to reflect as much. So, sort of on a common-sensical level anyway, it's probably true that we're not devoting as much of our energy to thinking as we used to.

I think none of us can escape the acceleration of daily life. and so it requires a greater sense of discipline, commitment, to do things that are no longer quite so natural. But reading, as Adrienne knows well, has never really been natural at all. It's something that we have to invest a long time to learn to do. Humans are not born as readers. They are born as speakers,

so all you need to become an eloquent speaker is to be in a speaking environment. It doesn't require any formal training. Reading takes years of formal training. So in that sense, it's not natural. It's also not natural in the sense that our brains are naturally, very easily distracted, and reading takes a lot of concentration. So we need to learn to pay attention over a longer period of time.

So you have to ask, you know, what is it that reading does with the human, brain, and it forces us to learn a trick that we don't naturally perform. Attention is absolutely central to the entire process of what I will call deep reading. In 2018, Marianne Wolfe wrote a book called Reader Come Home, the Reading Brain in a digital world. It's about the importance of what she calls deep reading as a tool for thought. Deep reading includes a range of processes from, connecting background knowledge to the text in front of you, inferential reasoning about that, very importantly, the combination of empathy, bringing affective feelings to bear and critical

analysis. Reading is a matter of not just thought and perception and memory, but it's about feeling. And those affective feelings of being immersed, allowed. you to pass over into other people's perspective, whether it's time or character, time being like 19th century or the future, you know, how that allows you to experience otherness in both personalities, views, times, cultural perspectives. It allows you to try on this because you've given enough time in an immersive way. That is out the window if you're on the phone all the time. Interest in voluntary reading has declined. We don't have an adult culture, at least in the United States, and in a number of other countries. It's not true for every country in the world,

but for a number of other countries, there's no longer an adult culture of reading. Naomi Barron is a linguist and Professor Emerita at American University in Washington, D.C. Her book Readerbot asks what's lost when we stop taking books off the shelf. So we have that force coming together with the force of AI making it so simple to do what the cliff notes or the spark notes of this world did for some earlier generations of, you know, here's the. the summary of the plot, so you don't have to read the book yourself. So when those two forces come together, I ask myself, how much will people feel that reading is worth it? If you're relying on evaporative media, whether that's TikTok or whether that's a quick media post, that basically disappear, I mean, they're not all Snapchat, but they sort of function that way. We don't go back

and say, wait a second, what did that TikTok actually claim? What did that social media? a post claim? What did that Reddit post claim? You know, we see it and it's done. And if you just look at what is happening in the moment, and I mean, do mean look, whether it's on television or quick social media, whatever, then you don't have a context for saying, but wait a second, and the moment looks like a bright move, but you know, what happened the last time we got involved in Latin America? Did things go well there? And if people no longer believe that the written word is a source, a potential source anyway, of wisdom and of guidance for going forward and a basis for making individual judgments, then what are we left with? We're left with

political rallies and we're left with social media and nothing else. Democracy is, of course, at risk and we can see that in the way online developments are happening. Democracy is very fragile. And I think if we don't do enough disciplined thinking, then democracy becomes at greater risk. In 2023, Adrienne co-authored the Lubliana Reading Manifesto, a sweeping declaration about the importance of higher-level reading. What is the Lubliana reading manifesto? It's a call to arms, if you like. What we're saying is, look, higher-level reading has been incredibly important for creating and now maintaining the sort of sophisticated society

that we live in today. And if we don't keep up this higher level reading, then possibly we're losing an essential ability to keep up this society that we've created. And would you be able to read a little bit of it? Okay. So the future of reading affects the future of our societies. A democratic society based on informed multi-stakeholder consensus can only succeed with resilient readers,

well-versed in higher-level reading. Policymakers in all fields need to be aware of this, for in the words of Margaret Atwood's much-quoted warning, if there are no young readers and writers, there will be shortly no older ones. Literacy will be dead and democracy will be dead as well. And who are we to argue with the words of Margaret Atwood? Right. Well, there's another saying that I might like to just read out to you and that is based on Orwell and it's if people cannot read well, they cannot think well. And if they cannot think well, others will do the thinking for them. I quite like that one too. We have a growing amount of evidence neurologically and experimentally psychologically. The people aren't

putting forth the effort, whatever that effort might be, for writing, for thinking through a problem, when they are using some version of AI, then if they are not using it. So you put that together cognitive effort with the lack of effort for reading, because some reading, particularly of the serious sort, is hard. And even the relaxing sort of reading takes concentration. It takes putting your mind there rather than constantly checking your phone. So you have this growing combination of elements that's saying you don't need to apply cognitive effort. You don't need to do the work in a large range of areas yourself. So there's skill degradation, but there's also a loss of all the wonderful things that reading can do for you. We lose out on what 5,500 years

give or take, writing has given us, and the reading thereof has given us as a way of amusing ourselves, of a way of representing ourselves, of a way of rethinking, of a way of escaping, of a way of modeling behavior through seeing how others have done it, things like the buildings from on. We miss out on all of that. And that's to our detriment as a civilization. Do you want to read a book with Mommy? Yeah. Sit. What is it?

Read it. I recently said. set up a new bookcase for my toddler. He loves turning the pages and showing off his growing vocabulary. It's on the next page. What's there? Window. Window.

But it remains to be seen just how reading will fit into the new landscape of thinking that he's going to inherit. If you look historically, mass literacy became ubiquitous towards the end of the 19th century. That is only about six generations ago. Now, if you then look at what happened at the time and since that time in human culture, you can see things like we evolved modern electoral democracy for the first time. There were huge social and political emancipation movements.

There was a knowledge revolution, an explosion of scientific knowledge and technological invention, with breakthroughs in all sorts of areas, history, philosophy, linguistics, particle physics, genetics, nanotechnology, and so on. All happening since mass literacy. Now, that's not conclusive evidence, but is it really coincidence? Piano. Piano. Piano. Mano. Mano. Telling the future is a notoriously dangerous thing to engage in. I'm very hesitant.

But if we let our reading habits decline the way we have done in the last, well, a couple of decades, three decades, then extrapolating from that, you might think, we'll... are maybe possibly losing the knack to think properly. It's use it or lose it. If we farm out our reading and we do, the fastest growing segment of the book market is the audio book market. If we get the chance, prefer to listen to a TED Talk or YouTube film,

rather than read. We farm out our thinking to AI. If we continue to do that, it's use it or lose it. You know, our listeners will be taking this in an audio form. Do you think they should maybe consider going back and reading the transcript after? Well, you know, if there's a healthy diet audio can certainly play a role in it, Why not? I mean, we consider having conversations as a very rewarding part of our daily lives,

and there's no reason to stop with that and do everything by writing only. But I think what we're heading for is a very imbalanced diet. And I think reading is taking second position because we really love convenience, and we really like the idea that we can make life easy. for ourselves. And while we make life easier for ourselves, we are also not giving ourselves the opportunity to practice our thinking. If you do want to make life just a little harder for yourself, in a good way, you can read along with a transcript of this episode in the Apple podcast app. This documentary from producer Annie Bender is about the complicated art of thinking well in the

digital age. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. This program is brought to you in part by Specsavers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes.

Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexavers.cavers.cai exams are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.com to learn more. A lot of short daily news podcasts focus on just one story. But right now, you probably need more. On Up First from NPR, we bring you three of the world's top headlines every day in under 15 minutes. Because no one's story can capture all that's happening in this big, crazy world of ours on any given morning. Listen now to the Up First podcast. from NPR.

How do you define what it means to think well? I'm not sure I would even want to answer it on the fly, Annie. It's a question that invites you to think about all the aspects that go into thought itself. If you do start really thinking, you don't know where it's. going to lead you. You don't know where it's going to go. For Humanities Professor Alan Jacobs of Baylor University, thinking well requires courage and a leap of faith. When we genuinely reflect on the possibilities that are available to us, we put ourselves at risk. As he noted in this 2018 address, there's a certain degree of vulnerability that comes with thinking deeply.

Ideas are being debated, assertions are being questioned, beliefs are being put into context or challenged in some way. It is a continually risky endeavor. And we put ourselves at risk, not just intellectually, but also socially. But the rise of generative AI is making those risks easier than ever to avoid. Hello? I can hear you know. Oh, Shannon, hi. Hi. I'm so sorry about the hassle and the weight. I have no idea what went wrong. But yeah, man, it's like this old school. Producer Annie Bender looks to the future of reading and thinking in the age of artificial intelligence. I was just going to ask you to introduce yourself who you are, you know,

whatever feels most salient in terms of the conversation we're about to have. I'm Shannon. Valor. I'm a professor at the University of Edinburgh. I'm the author of a book called The AI Mirror, How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking. I was in a classroom, and one of the assignments required students to sort of independently think of some possible answers to a question, and it wasn't graded. It was a very safe assignment. And when we looked at the answers that students had submitted, it was clear that a large number of these answers had been generated by an AI model. And one thing that really broke my heart was I had a student, one of the most intellectually engaged students in the course,

which you could tell by their interactions during the class. This was someone who was clearly paying attention, clearly intellectually curious and thoughtful. And this student came up to me afterwards and confessed that they were one of the students who had submitted an AI-generated response. And they said, you know, I'm really disappointed in myself because I think I had more interesting things to say. And I had written that out. But then I looked at it and I didn't trust myself. And I thought that some of these ideas were maybe just too weird or just too, maybe they weren't relevant. Maybe they weren't right. So I went back and asked AI what a good answer to the question would be. And then I used that to trim out anything that didn't fit what the AI model gave me.

and I really wish I hadn't done that. And I just walked away from that interaction thinking, oh, we're in trouble, right? Because this student is just one of many. And this student was a very good student and one with a lot of promise, the kind of student that we expect to be able to see great things from. And they're already leaning on this system that they don't need, which is ultimately diminishing their creativity and diminishing their confidence. Because this is a student who would have been much more bold in their things.

thinking before a tool like this was available to them. For Shannon Valor, thinking well is to some extent about creativity. And creativity requires more than just time and cognitive patience. It also requires confidence. I use the example of mountain climbing. So if you think about how you build confidence as a mountain climber, how do you get up the mountain? Well, the mountain climber does it through a process of trial and error that has real stakes.

and by encountering a mountain that does not mold itself to their attempts. So the slippery part of the mountain doesn't make itself easier when you encounter difficulty. You have to get better in order to climb it. Now, compare that with trying to work through something of intellectual difficulty with a chatbot. The problem is that these chatbots will mold themselves and their answers to you, and they will accommodate your cognitive limits in ways that will induce a false sense of confidence, right? Unearned confidence. If a person has a confidence that they can jump off a roof and fly, that's not something we want them to have, right?

I wanted to ask what you make of the contention that these tools could alter our confidence in our own ability as a reader and a thinker, It could limit our belief in what we're capable of thinking on our own. Well, with good reason. We should have no confidence if we haven't built up a thinking apparatus. That's a correct assumption. In the last year, there have been these studies, one way group from Microsoft on workers who are using AI and those who are using only their own critical judgment to make decisions. And what you see is very simple.

If they think that they're going to do it using AI, they don't use their more critical analytic processes. Now, that's one study that's very basic for, I'd say, the average adult. But then there's an MIT graduate student study in which the students were given CHATGBT or not to write an essay. And the students who used chat GBT compared to the others had different brain activation patterns, but very importantly and very simply, they couldn't remember a single sentence that they had written themselves. This is a line from Sherry Turkle at MIT.

She wrote it years ago. She says, we do not transgress when we innovate. We transgress when we do not allow. ourselves to examine what an innovation will disrupt or destroy. And that's what I think about with ChatGBT. What are we disrupting? What are we destroying potentially in its development? If we have reading done for us, we minimize the number of occasions to figure out, well, what do I think? What do I feel? Why does this matter to me? How does this connect up with other parts of my life? read one thing that's it spur me to read something else? Because I haven't read it, I'm not

going to have an occasion to be so spurred. There's a section in Naomi Barron's book, Reader Bot, that I've been thinking about a lot. In it, she describes how students are relying on generative AI to write their admissions essays in an effort to optimize their odds of getting into their preferred school. And it becomes this vicious cycle because admissions officers are increasingly also using AI to read the incoming applications. At some point, you have to step back and ask, what exactly are we trying to do here? What's the best case you could make right now to someone who's in a university class and doesn't want to write their own essay wants to use an AI language model to do it? I mean, in kind of the traditions of

my debate group, I wouldn't start with an argument, I would start with a question, which is, why don't you drop the class? Well, what if their answer to your question is they need the grade, you know, to get the degree and they need the degree to get a job? And it's just as simple as that. Oh, it's lame, though, right? I think there's that question of what parts of your thinking are good to delegate to someone else and what parts have to be thunk for yourself. You know, and I use Claude for things like in the past week trying to figure out if I should bring a sick kid into the pediatrician. And Claude can kind of be an approximation of what does a typical pediatrician say to these symptoms?

And I both don't want to start from the beginning and acquire all the knowledge a pediatrician has, but I also don't want to take off work and pull my kid out of school to see the real pediatrician, if they're just going to say, come back later. But when it comes to the conversations I have with my kids, when they ask me big questions or little questions, We talk a lot about Julius Caesar in my house much more than preschoolers typically do because my husband is a high school teacher and his kids staged Julius Caesar last year. I come to bury Caesar not to praise him. So my kids have lots of questions about tyranny and friendship and loyalty.

And I don't want to direct any of those questions to an AI because I don't want them to receive the median person's approximation of whether Julius Caesar was a tyrant. I want my kids to have the space to think through. some of the questions for themselves, and I also want them to hear my answers in particular and make this part of our connection. What ends up happening is on the one hand you save an incredible amount of time by having an AI do the reading for you, but it also obviates the need or the opportunity for you to read yourself. What's happening now in the world of science, and I understand the rationale for it, is people are all.

are relying on various tools to, number one, locate what articles might be of interest on a particular topic, to do whatever the researcher asks for, to summarize each article, to compare them, to write a summary, you know, to do a kind of meta-analysis across the articles. And it does a really interesting job in that it looks quite impressive. But what gets eliminated is the perspective of the researcher. We're treating research as if it's an automatic system. So you put your coin in the slot and then the research comes out. It's individual researchers who stop and think, wait a second, is that true?

Or, you know what? This sparks something in my mind that's not actually in the article, but reading this article makes me think about whatever it happens to be. And that is what's getting lost when we have, in this case, in the research world, when we have our research predigested for us. And I understand the importance of not missing things that might be important. But you know what? We're going to miss things anyway, whether we use AI Science Direct or whether we do it ourselves.

going to miss some things, but we're also going to have the opportunity if we'd say, I'm doing this, at least some of it, the old-fashioned way. You know, I'll go for 50-50. We have the opportunity to be an individual scientist, an individual explorer, an individual human mind. 50-50 might seem like a reasonable bargain, but it's unclear how many people will take Naomi up on it now that generative AI is offering up a sort of intellectual moving sidewalk, ready to take us from A to B, without all the mental steps. You know, it's very hard to opt out of this fast-moving world in which we think we have no time to engage in reflection, to engage in deeper thought. We think there is so much going on

that we need to keep track of. And it's very easy to ditch habits like reading, because they are so demanding. So you can't really blame individuals, is perhaps what I'm trying to say. You know, it's it's not up to individuals to say, now I've got to make a stand. I've got to force myself to think more. It would be great if we all could, but it's so easy not to. So, you know, that is, that is a task that we confront as a society rather than as individuals. Are you trying to put the apple in the toothbrush holder? Yeah. I want to ask you about the time piece of the equation here because, you know, we're all very busy.

We're busy folk, right? How much of the problem here is that modern life just doesn't give us the time to do this anymore? I completely agree with the assumption that we are too busy. and that we don't have time. I disagree in that we don't have to be like that. And that is, I think we should have more priority given to the quality of what we experience, not the quantity that we so, in our culture, so rapaciously value as efficiency. It's a rapacious appetite for efficiency that I believe is a part of the problem.

We can't experience the present because we have got this efficiency principle. So we're moving from one experience to the next. And so we are not experiencing anything at the level that would make life, I think, have more quality. If there's any group of people that I would excuse from this, it's the young parents. but everybody else, everybody else, I say, prioritize. Sweetie, did you make a mess? Yeah. It's nice to be let off the hook, especially by Marianne Wolfe,

but I don't think I'll take a rep on it. Cannot. Cannot. I'd rather take a lesson from the way children engage with the world, particularly when it comes to what Leah Sargent calls the friction of thinking. Kine up. Kids have a near infinite patience for this sometimes where my son, we were visiting a friend who has a little step down into their living room, and he's just learning about how

to get down a step by himself. So he was ignoring a room full of toys, just climb up the step and then try and step down again and again and again. And the reason he was drawn to it was because it was hard for him. I think my job as a mother is to help my kids hold on to the sense that that feeling of friction is the sign you're near somewhere you can grow and how to calibrate, well, what amount of difficulty, what kind of hurt is the wrong kind of hurt, but that excitement, even when they're adults who otherwise rest on what feels easy and what feels comfortable. When things are difficult, the right amount of difficult for you, something exciting could be about to happen. And I think that's something adults don't believe very often, that adults try and find

the areas where they have mastery and where things are. are easier or finding a flow state, and that once you hit friction, it's a sign you've hit the domain you're not very good at, and therefore you want to back off. Like any challenging accomplishment, climbing steps included, reading and thinking have to be maintained. If we do not maintain, if you forget how to read at that deep level, if you are no longer able to be immersed in reading, you will slowly but surely. And in person, receptively atrophy the reading brain circuit. It's like any skill. It won't disappear. You know, that's what's so deceptive. It'll be there. You'll feel like you can read and that you're getting

the gist of the information. But will you have those feelings that allow you to activate your own best thoughts that's Proust or that will give you a chance to have a more empathic understanding of others. You don't give it time. You don't get the reward. Shannon Baller. Our schools, our institutions, our workplaces are all about metrics, are all about the tests, all about the benchmarks, all about ensuring conformity to an external standard that we use to measure whether the school is successful to measure whether our children are successful. So this, you know, this long process of turning education into an exercise in producing test scores, as opposed to expanding minds. Or the way we've turned the workforce into a system for producing people who will see themselves as maximally efficient and optimizing machines for generating outputs.

instead of people collectively engaged in meaningful labor. We've already primed people to use these tools in ways that will mechanize their thinking and diminish their creativity. So it's not just the tool itself. It's the tool plus the incentives. It's the tool plus the values that we have promoted unwisely, I think, over the last few decades, where we have been trying to turn our children, trying to turn ourselves into maximally efficient machines. And so it should be no surprise now that we've built machines

that will speed up that process, we imagine. You use this metaphor in your book of AI as a mirror, and it raises the question, this analogy of AI as a mirror, of what thoughts exactly these mirrors are or aren't reflecting back to us. We know, of course, that the mirror is not reflecting the thoughts of all of humanity and certainly not representing the thoughts of humanity in any kind of neutral way. What gets fed into these models, the light that falls on them, if you will, comes from the sources of digitized data that large AI platform companies had access to. And that is all of the material that they scraped off.

of the internet primarily. And we know that the internet doesn't reflect everyone equally. So we see that machine learning models reflect back to us thoughts that represent historical majorities, people who have had disproportionate access to the internet, and people who have had the social privilege to have their thoughts recorded and transmitted to future generations. It's also profoundly backward-looking in a way. How does that create limitations for it as a tool for human thought? That's the thing that I think worries me the most in the long term about how we are using these tools. There are absolutely legitimate uses for large language models,

but increasingly people are using them as substitutes for human thought and decision-making. we're using them to offload our own cognitive responsibilities. The problem with that is that all that these models can do is analyze the patterns of the thoughts we've already had. And so whenever we rely on these tools to then generate new decisions or new art or new code, what we're doing is ensuring that those same patterns are extended into the future.

Our world is tremendously complex. We should not forget that. We've created that world in which we've had a knowledge revolution and it's still going on, but the complexity that results from it is unbelievable. And if we need to somehow deal with that complexity and the challenges that it creates, and you can think of all the problems that humanity is facing yourself, then perhaps we need, the discipline. We need to work on our capacity to think just to survive. Think about what humans do when we make great leaps forward in art or in politics or in science. Often those great leaps forward are moments where we break from the patterns of the past and we create a pattern that we've never seen before, a pattern but never existed before.

but that our minds have put together in a new way. And that kind of creativity is at risk of being lost if instead we turn all of our productive, artistic, and cognitive capability over to machines that are designed to regenerate the patterns that the model has already seen. So we've got this rhetoric that AI is the future, that AI is the window through which we build better worlds. But in fact, I think AI is something that threatens to eat the future

by simply reproducing the past and putting it where the future should be. The future is. is very top of mind for me because I have an 18-month-old at home. He's just starting to use his language to express himself. We spend a lot of time reading books together. Oh, that's great. And so I do think a lot about the world that he's going to grow up in and the world of thinking that I want him to inhabit as he grows. So, you know, there's this fun. fundamental question of why do we think at all? What is thinking for? And I guess the last thing I want to ask you is how can we reestablish the importance, the value of learning and then of thinking in a world as you describe that's so

tuned toward efficiency and ease? Yeah. I think that's such an important question. And I think it comes down to learning to recover and reclaim the joy that we find in thinking. So that's something that I find a lot of my students who have been in very high-pressured educational environments for their whole lives have either lost touch with or never been given the privilege of taking pleasure in thinking, because it's always been been a task. It's always been something where the most important thing is that they not fail, where the most important thing is that they meet the standard. And I think the most important thing about thinking is what a tremendous source of joy it can be. Where do you find the most joy in

thinking? You know, I find a lot of joy in reading fiction. And I think another thing that allows me to remain connected to the joy of thinking is conversation with other people who don't already share my point of view. A lot of times you say, yeah, I'm really interested in this thing. And then they just look at you. Like, what? Why would you be interested in that? That sounds incredibly boring. Or I have no idea what you're talking about. And then suddenly you have this incentive to articulate what it is that's fascinating about this weird little hobby that you have or what it is that's exciting about this new book or this new TV show that you're into. And so you start telling this story and you start finding in your own thoughts the source of that value because you're trying to

communicate it to somebody else. And then they're trying to do the same for you. And so it's in the friction of conversation with other people that we discover new pleasure. artistic and intellectual horizons. And that's something that I think we need to reclaim as well. And so if you have children, find ways to help them take pleasure in intellectual exploration, where it's not about the pressure to succeed, where it's not about the fear of failure. And if you don't have kids, think about how you you can recover that joy for yourself, because I think a lot of us are in work environments, where we're not allowed to explore new horizons, where we're not allowed to take intellectual

risks, where we're not allowed to sit and reflect and ponder about where we might go next, where it's always about pressuring us to perform like a machine. So if we can back away from that and recover the source of joy in thinking, then I think we can find the reasons to resist harmful uses of AI and rebuild the intellectual foundations for a creative and wise and enjoyable way of life. Should we read this book about the two polar bears?

Yeah. Yeah. Polar bear this. Polar. Polar Bears. Can you say polar bears? That's right. And it's been a joy thinking about all that. This documentary about the art of thinking is from Ideas, producer, Annie Bender.

Do you see the birds? Ideas is a broadcast and a podcast. If you like the episode you just heard, check out our vast archive, where you can find more than 300 of our past episodes. Should we turn the page? Yeah. Technical production, Sam McNulty and Emily Carvezio. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer Nicola Luxchich.

Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyad. The bears are waving goodbye. Do you see that? No, we're doing. Bye. Bye.