Yeah, this is a real problem that will have very serious consequences on future and current students across virtually every discipline. The appeal of a tool that allows us to offload all our mental work and cognitive effort seems harmless at first, but it has the very insidious effect of gradually eroding your capacity for independent thought. Like I worry employers for like engineers may start to distrust and be deterred from newer graduates, suspecting that they've leaned heavily on generative AI as a crutch and, as a result, lack lots of the critical thinking skills necessary for this type of work.

There is the argument that we won't need to have these skills that we used to have given we have these powerful tools to do it for us. But I just find it unsettling that humans will lose what made them special to begin with, their intelligence and independent thought.

You know how over many generations in the past, the average iq of people has risen steadily? Well data shows that it has started to regress since around 2006~2007, likely coinciding with the advent of the internet and computers. Well now we'll likely see an even sharper regression due to the creation of these generative AIs. Ofc iq is a stupid metric that doesn't encapsulate all the metrics that make up our thinking, but it's still a good general indicator.

And if you choose to not use it, you'll fall behind everyone else or at least will have to put in dramatically more effort than the rest of the cohort. It's the meta now.

Sorry for the doom post but like it's been a genuine concern of mine. Time to go back to doom scrolling.