George Rebane

Intellectual savant and libertarian Jeffery Tucker offers us some very insightful conclusions about “intellectual obesity” in his ‘The Backlash Against the Screen’.  He points the finger directly at the way high tech and specifically AI is being misused and well on its way to creating an entire generation of double dummies.  The downturn began with the introduction of smartphones and pads into the hands of students.

At the time, twenty years ago, technology was heralded as ushering in a new epoch in education to produce a new legion of smarter than ever graduates for our workforce.  The resulting reality was exactly the opposite; test scores kept going down and the students became more intellectually handicapped than ever.  Of the hits our kids took from technology, Tucker tells us that “The impact (of AI) on thinking is more dramatic. There is no real shortcut to training the human mind. It requires time, work, memorization, logical puzzles, the formation of a clarity of mind, a narrative of history, deep reading of the classics, and mastery over tools such as language, math, and science—plus the development of technical facility in reading and otherwise.”

It does not take a genius to see how this kind of educational upbringing has created a cohort of younger voters who will gladly swallow hook, line, and sinker from the likes of Mamdani, Sanders, AOC, and Warren.  The result is the plague of collective governance that has conquered our major urban centers and is now spreading across America.  A new technologically abetted dark age threatens.