A couple months ago, while I was thumbing through old magazines at a record shop, I landed on a gem. “Learning To Love the Computer” emblazoned the cover of Nutshell magazine, a now-defunct periodical for college students. This 1981 issue showed a desk littered with books about Shakespeare, some chips, a Coke can, a boxy PC displaying the start of a homework assignment, and a college student grinning widely. I grinned back. Then I bought the issue.
“You’d better hurry up and learn to love them, because they’re rapidly reshaping our world,” the story said of PCs. Computers changed how we worked and socialized as they swallowed steadily larger bites of tasks previously reserved for typewriters, pens, and minds. That momentum has not stopped. And as generative AI gobbles up internet functions from research to retail, our professional and personal lives also invariably shift.
To make sense of how GenAI can change our lives and our minds, the real questions are, what even is critical thinking? And what does it mean for our intellectual skills to deteriorate?
That’s not news. It’s hardly even surprising. Jeff Shear, the Nutshell writer, speculated as much about the rise of computers. “Exactly how computers will alter our lives is difficult to predict. One possibility some theorists have suggested is increased personal isolation. By the end of this decade the big question facing many Americans may be ‘Why bother going to work?’” he wrote.
