In fitness, there is a concept called “time under tension.” Take a simple squat, where you hold a weight and lower your hips from a standing position. With the same weight, a person can do a squat in two seconds or 10 seconds. The latter is harder, but it also builds more muscle. More time is more tension; more pain is more gain.
Thinking benefits from a similar principle of “time under tension.” It is the ability to sit patiently with a group of barely connected or disconnected ideas that allows a thinker to braid them together into something that is combinatorially new. It’s very difficult to defend this idea by describing other people’s thought processes, so I’ll describe my own.
A few weeks ago, The Argument Editor-in-Chief Jerusalem Demsas asked me to write an essay about the claim that AI systems would take all of our jobs within 18 months. My initial reaction was … no?
The prediction is so stupendously aggressive and almost certainly wrong, so my instinct was there was really nothing more to say on the subject. Certainly not 1,799 words more. But as I sat with the prompt, several pieces of a puzzle began to slide together: a Financial Times essay I’d read, an Atlantic article I liked, a National Assessment of Educational Progress study I’d saved in a tab, an interview with Cal Newport I’d recorded, a Walter Ong book I was encouraged to read, a stray thought I’d had in the gym recently while trying out eccentric pullups for the first time about how time multiplies both pain and gain in fitness settings. The contours of a framework came into view.
The problem of the next 18 months isn’t AI disemploying all workers, or students losing competition after competition to nonhuman agents. The problem is whether we will degrade our own capabilities in the presence of new machines. We are so fixated on how technology will outskill us that we miss the many ways that we can deskill ourselves.
You have 18 months.
That’s the message from several leading AI executives and thinkers about how long people will retain their advantage over artificial intelligence in the workforce. By the summer of 2027, the story goes, AI’s explosion in capabilities will leave carbon-based life forms in the dust. Up to “half of all entry-level white-collar jobs” will be wiped out, and even Nobel Prize-worthy minds will cower in fear that AI’s architects will have built a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.”
This doomsday clock seems true enough to many people, because the question I’ve fielded more than any other from parents in the last few months is some version of: “If AI is about to be better than us at everything, what should my children do?” If generative AI is better at coding, diagnosing, and problem-solving than any software programmer, radiologist, or mathematician, then even the traditionally “safe” majors like computer science, medicine, and math could be anything but safe.
I understand the anxiety behind the question, but rather than try to forecast the future as it might turn out, I’d prefer to describe reality as it already exists. While we have no idea how AI might make working people obsolete at some imaginary date, we can already see how technology is affecting our capacity to think deeply right now. And I am much more concerned about the decline of thinking people than I am about the rise of thinking machines.
The end of writing, the end of reading
... continue reading