Miguel Afonso Caetano“The irony of this posture is that there’s almost no sector of American life—with the notable exception of the tech world’s political retainers in the Trump White House—that is less welcoming to rigorous thinking than Silicon Valley. The apostles of algorithmic dominance cheerlead chatbots and technocratic shortcuts for thinking and reasoning, and use them extensively themselves, even though the models hallucinate and have a baleful tendency toward sycophancy. “Researchers found that nearly a dozen leading models were highly sycophantic,” a recent New York Times story on the explosion in AI chatbots reported, “taking the users’ side in interpersonal conflicts 49 percent more often than humans did—even when the user described situations in which they broke the law, hurt someone or lied.”
The obsequious intellectual concierges of the AI revolution also reduce cognitive strain on users, which further weakens their capacity for thinking. An MIT Media Lab study titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT” found that LLM users “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” The tech oligarchs have somehow managed to enshittify thinking.”