Letter from an unplugged region of my mind

I know pretty much nothing about artificial intelligence (AI) except what I’ve read about it. Take what follows with a grain of salt, therefore. As I try to understand the world that AI is going to create, there are a couple of metaphors I keep coming back to. One is of a highway system that no longer has any on-ramps. There were on-ramps, once upon a time, when the highway system was first built, but they fell into disuse and then decay. This image represents what I think AI will do to the social shape of literacy—to the distribution of the ability to read for sustained periods, and to write anything longer than a tweet. People in middle age aren’t likely to lose these skills overnight, but many will shed them gradually, once they have the option to engage in “cognitive surrender,” as it’s called, and I worry that among younger generations, only a saving remnant (if that) will have in sufficient quantities both the intellectual ambition and the will power necessary to develop the…