Efficiency has become a thing of supreme value in a world where productivity seems to be the main motivation for everything. However, there is a point at which this pursuit of efficiency becomes reductive and makes us reducers…
The time it takes someone to write anything (be it a book, a piece of news or an email) must be proportionally less than the time it took to compose that content.
The time needed to create content is (or should be) longer than the time needed to read it. This is what makes communication valuable.
We live under the idea that efficiency reigns over everything else and, therefore, we are always hearing phrases like: “use your time well”; “don’t waste time”; “Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today”.
Efficiency has become something of supreme value, in a world where productivity seems to be the main motivation for everything. The more we can do the better.
But There is a point at which the pursuit of efficiency becomes reductive. Communication itself is so undervalued that the generation of content becomes more important than the content of that content.
Until… AI arrived
As , writes in an article, the world has changed and modern LLM/IA systems, in recent years, have made us go through this vicissitude.
We can now generate reams of content in a matter of seconds. For example, emails that take a recipient five or 10 minutes to read are taking seconds to be created by the sender.
Perhaps most people will do the responsible thing and re-read the generated email before hitting send. Or maybe not.
Many people will think: “what’s worth reading these days when we can instantly get a bullet point summary?”; or “what’s worth writing knowing that some AI system will probably do the work for me?”
Does this make us dumber?
Maybe you use AI just to clarify your thoughts or turn a bunch of ideas in your head into coherent, communicable paragraphs.
“Everything is fine”, he will say… especially because the result (he will think) ends up being exactly what he wanted to say, but in a better form and style than anything he could produce alone.
But Is the end result really your thoughts? What if everyone started doing this?
Let’s keep doing this long enough and eventually we begin to lose the ability to communicate our thoughts to others. Our minds will start to think in terms of prompts the LLMgetting used to the idea that you only need the general idea of what you want to say and then the system will fill in the blanks.
When our thoughts resemble what we really want to say, we may suddenly think about how intelligent the computer has become. Or Could it be, after all, that we are the ones getting dumber?
“We have been reduced to something uncritical, something mechanical. We are the model of the repeater machine. We have forgotten how to communicate. We have become so stupid that we think machines are the ones that are intelligent”, concludes New Atlas.
