Is AI making us stupid?

 ​Just sharing:  You probably know Cal Newport ("Deep Work").  Here's a short excerpt of an interview where he's talking about AI and students (he teaches at Georgetown).  Seems wise.  I really like the "10,000 steps" metaphor.  

 Is Artificial Intelligence Eroding Our Ability to Think?

In this Chronicle of Higher Education interview with Evan Goldstein, Cal Newport (Georgetown University) talks about his worry that artificial intelligence is making us stupid. Some excerpts:

“When AI automates tasks that are repetitive or time-consuming,” says Newport, “or that you would be willing to hand off to a research assistant, I’m not so concerned. If a political scientist can use an AI coding agent to do a more comprehensive and faster data analysis to help them form an argument, that’s good.”

But he sees many students using AI to automate thought. “Think about having to write something and facing a blank screen. Blank-screen writing is hard. You might want to avoid that cognitive strain. You can get a good enough draft from AI and maybe edit it. You are spared cognitive strain. That worries me because cognitive strain is at the core of the entire post-Paleolithic human experience. It’s at the core of all big ideas. It’s at the core of empathy, morality, ethics, notions of justice and human rights, and religion and philosophy… Yes, automate drudgery. But automating hard thought is a dangerous direction to go.” 

The combination of distracting social media and artificial intelligence “is a powerful one-two punch,” says Newport. “This is a problem that’s 15 years in the making. The smartphone revolution and social media kicked this off. Now here comes AI at the worst time from the perspective of human thinking.”

“We need to think about cognitive fitness the way we think about physical fitness,” he continues. “There should be a simple rule for being a thinker in an age of AI: don’t let AI write anything for you. Writing is to cognitive health what steps are to physical health. Write that e-mail from scratch. Write that memo with the bullet points from scratch. Don’t flee the strain. You need it as much as you need those 10,000 steps a day.” 

How about the student experience? “We are going to look much more like classic Oxford than we do today,” says Newport. “More in-person testing, more blue books. Also, more Oxford-style tutorials where you sit with a proctor and walk through an argument and they assess how well you understand the material.” 

“Is AI Making Us Stupid? Cal Newport Is Worried” by Evan Goldstein in The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 27, 2026 (Vol. 72, #15, pp. 24-29)