Thinking is being outsourced to AI

Big Tech, Oligarchs, and the termination of critical thought

The most immediate, dominant, and relevant AI worry for most people is that our bosses will decide to replace us. And, as Brian Merchant recently wrote, it’s happening. Companies in multiple industries are steadily, and not that slowly, icing out more and more humans and replacing them with machines. Brian writes: “The AI jobs crisis is not the sudden displacement of millions of workers in one fell swoop—instead, it’s evident in the attrition in creative industries, the declining income of freelance artists, writers, and illustrators, and in corporations’ inclination to simply hire fewer human workers.”

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We’re not particularly good at getting our heads around crises that creep up little by little. When we aren’t thrust into action by an emergency, by a sudden breakdown, we keep living our lives. We see it with climate, fascism, and now AI. If it happened all at once, if we all suddenly found ourselves replaced by AI, there’d be an instantaneous uprising against Big Tech. But that’s not where we find ourselves, and our piecemeal replacement proceeds unabated.

There is one way, one case, in which AI was adopted quickly, so quickly that it created a generational divide. The rampant and nearly impossible to contain use of AI by millions of students across the world has already taken root, seemingly overnight, and young people appear almost oblivious to the price they’re paying for outsourcing critical thought.

A recent New York Magazine article on this dropped like a bomb. So many adults have only a fleeting understanding of just how much kids are using AI right now. I used to teach, but since changing careers I have little occasion to learn about how kids are approaching school. So this new piece, entitled “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College” grabbed me and shook me up.

I was left reeling, wondering not just what the future looks like but if the present is crumbling beneath our feet. You wouldn’t be surprised to learn that college students use AI, at least I’m not, but Walsh’s conversations, and an abundance of data, make clear that they’re using AI all the time, like all the time. Nearly a year ago studies already showed that 86% of students were using the new tech, and now it has become a universal companion, a thought replacement device.

The gut punch doesn’t come from the data, it never does — it comes from the stories. “Wendy,” one of the many college kids Walsh speaks to, shows him an paper she generated using AI, and it’s worth relaying in full:

“When I opened the document, I was surprised to see the topic: critical pedagogy, the philosophy of education pioneered by Paulo Freire. The philosophy examines the influence of social and political forces on learning and classroom dynamics. Her opening line: ‘To what extent is schooling hindering students’ cognitive ability to think critically?’ Later, I asked Wendy if she recognized the irony in using AI to write not just a paper on critical pedagogy but one that argues learning is what ‘makes us truly human.’ She wasn’t sure what to make of the question. ‘I use AI a lot. Like, every day,’ she said. ‘And I do believe it could take away that critical-thinking part. But it’s just — now that we rely on it, we can’t really imagine living without it.’”

There are endless quotes throughout the article that cause pain, like students saying that with AI “You just don’t really have to think that much” or “College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point.” Wendy herself acknowledges that the endless use of AI, particularly in tasks meant to build critical thinking, might take away some of her most important faculties. But she seems anesthetized, blandly resigned to this future. As a former English teacher, as a writer, as a person who wants us all to have a better world, it’s crushing.

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Walsh ultimately comes to the painful conclusion that “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate.” He also discusses recent research that has “linked AI usage with a deterioration in critical-thinking skills; one found the effect to be more pronounced in younger participants.” One such study points to cognitive offloading as a primary driver of the decline. Students, and a fair number of older adults, are outsourcing critical thought to machines. Essay writing is the perfect example because, as Emily M. Bender noted, “Teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills.”

But students don’t necessarily know that, and more importantly they don’t necessarily feel it. A huge part of teaching critical thinking skills to young people who haven’t fully developed those capacities is building investment, and our education system does a pretty terrible job there. Most students feel school is rote, repetitive, and makes them do tasks to fill space rather than to build vital abilities. And, most often, they’re right.

AI has both exposed and exacerbated these shortcomings. Why is school, and homework in particular, full of tasks that can just be fed into a machine? While the AI explosion is a problem in itself, it also highlights the failure of our education system. With a different sort of educational approach, this technology would have little to no appeal in the first place. So, as Walsh writes, “Most professors have come to the conclusion that stopping rampant AI abuse would require more than simply policing individual cases and would likely mean overhauling the education system to consider students more holistically.”

This all is, of course, a crisis. People will graduate college not knowing how to write, hardly knowing how to read, and only developing the ability to prompt machines into generating words for them. There were and are deep issues with our education system, a system that in many ways has looked more like running kids down an assembly line than fostering their individual traits and strengths. But this compounding crisis is creating a newfound generational gap. If it isn’t already clear, it soon will become apparent that there is a divide, a pre-AI generation and a post-AI generation. The critical thinking gap, in addition to massive gaps in numerous other skills and cognitive abilities, will make itself more visible day by day.

There is one group that doesn’t see this as a problem. The one dangerous minority, billionaires, is excited. Less critical thinking, a technology they can profit from, a more pliant workforce — the ruling class is thrilled. They’re already waging a war on public education in the form of the charter and privatization movement, and the mass adoption of AI probably thrills them for similar reasons. As they assault workers with the steady replacement of positions and duties with AI, they build their vision of a future where labor strength is crushed, mass unemployment prevails, and the jobs that do exist are increasingly menial.

They’re not hiding this vision of the future. Marc Andreessen, billionaire venture capitalist and Trump advisor, recently said that AI will take nearly every job except his. The special wizardry of buying companies and stripping them for parts before selling them off will somehow be exempt. He says that it takes the human touch to “pick a winner” in the vulture capital business. This is of course utter nonsense, but it shows how AI and other tech isn’t just rolled out neutrally, it’s used by a ruling class with specific interests, namely enriching themselves at our expense.

If AI was actually being used to maximize the collective good it would be trained to do menial and cumbersome tasks, not creative work that replaces jobs and supplants critical thought. But it’s not meant to ease or empower. More and more of us are being deliberately made “redundant” as bosses attempt to remove power from workers and consolidate it among themselves. This is how AI is being rolled out, and like all tools we can’t just look at what it’s capable of, we have to examine how it’s being used, and by whom.

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The erosion of critical thought, the attendant weakening of a generation, the elimination of workers, all of this is not conspiratorial thinking — it’s the inevitable, terminal logic of capitalism’s insatiable quest for profit. Is it sustainable? No. It’ll create an even more incomprehensibly lopsided society with untenable unemployment. With homelessness increasingly criminalized, more and more of us will wind up working behind bars if the billionaires keep getting their way. It’s hard to know exactly what this trajectory holds, but the outlook is bleak if nothing changes.

As Brian Merchant wrote in his recent piece, the AI jobs crisis is “a crisis in the nature and structure of work, more than it is about trends surfacing in the economic data.” Similarly, the AI college crisis calls into question the nature of education, and collectively we’re encountering a crisis in the nature of society. We’re being forced to confront whether or not we’re okay with a new stratification, with the masses huddled below a layer of AI that sits between us and the ruling elites. We’re being forced to reckon with the extremes of capitalist inequality. The fear of machine overlords is reasonable, but we should be more concerned about the people above the machines, the people controlling how they’re used and profiting from it all. They, and the system they operate under, are the real threat to the rest of us.

I know we’re tired of crises. I know the threat of fascism looms larger than AI in most of our minds. But the two are part of a larger whole. The threats we face are wrapped up and tied together by the thread of capitalist rule. The ruling class prefers authoritarianism over democracy, dulled minds over thinking ones, machines over workers, and short-term profits over our collective future. AI serves them in countless ways, and if it brings unrest they’ve invested trillions in the military and police for just that occasion.

The truth to confront right now is that rethinking everything isn’t radical, it isn’t really even a choice for the 99%. Billionaires are reshaping everything as we speak; they’re reshaping education, work, and the contours of society as a whole. So rethinking everything isn’t a choice, it’s an inevitability being forced upon us. Now we have to act, be decisive, and rebel before the ability to rethink everything is lost, taken from us by machines and the oligarchs who control them.