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‘I hate what AI is doing to the minds and happiness of the young’: Katherine Rundell on the view from the classroom
‘I hate what AI is doing to the minds and happiness of the young’: Katherine Rundell on the view from the classroom
Guardian essay by a children’s novelist and Oxford fellow who spends her working life in schools. Names the same break the Information Shock argument names in education: the student’s artifact no longer certifies the student’s understanding. Her formulation is the sharpest available, that this is the first time it is possible to produce an essay without reading the essay you wrote. Where she parts company is on the exchange itself. She holds that nothing is learned inside it, and offers refusal and reading as the remedy. That makes this the best public statement of the case that mode-two authorship substitutes for cognition rather than co-producing it, and worth answering rather than shelving. Her defense of the essay as a method of thinking rather than a proof of it is a live challenge to any account that treats the document as evidence only. Evidence base is uneven and needs checking before citation.
#education#counter-argument#cognition
·theguardian.com·
‘I hate what AI is doing to the minds and happiness of the young’: Katherine Rundell on the view from the classroom
The ‘dead internet theory’ is real. And it’s killing the web as we know it
The ‘dead internet theory’ is real. And it’s killing the web as we know it
McGrath reports that bots now generate the majority of web traffic, and AI agents that actually transact on the web (not just scrape it) grew nearly 8,000% in a single year. The business implication is that the attention economy breaks when there are no human eyeballs to monetize. The Information Shock implication runs deeper: when people send AI to browse, shop, and research on their behalf, they stop encountering documents directly. The web page, which was itself a document you visited, read, and evaluated, gets absorbed into the exchange. You never see it. You only see what the AI brought back and told you about it.
#consequences#economics
·fastcompany.com·
The ‘dead internet theory’ is real. And it’s killing the web as we know it
The Age of Reading Is Over
The Age of Reading Is Over
Unlike the Library of Alexandria, our texts won't turn to dust—they are perfectly preserved on silicon chips. The modern dark age isn't defined by the destruction of knowledge, but by our total apathy and fading ability to engage with it. Using AI in exchanges will most like exacerbate this problem.
·theatlantic.com·
The Age of Reading Is Over