Ah, I've been working on something the is tangential to this. I'm surprised that the author didn't bring up how people are using AI to do their reading for them.
here is an article about Andrew Tate not enjoying reading.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/slow-reading-books-benefits/686266/
give me a 300 word summary.
I suspect many people are coming to rely on LLM generated summaries to facilitate their understanding of an article or a topic. You encounter an article that is too long or too complicated or too far afield from your areas of expertise and maybe you are in a rush, so instead of slogging through it you ask chat to give you a summary. Maybe you go back and forth with chat for a bit to really get it. And this is how you read the article.
The Herbert Simon quote you call out doesn't quite get to the real problem though. While lack of focus certainly is a real thing in the world, I think the trouble the author's really trying to get at is that people aren't being thoughtful, they aren't giving a good workout to their reasoning abilities.
In the same way that it is laughable to as an LLM to do your meditation hour for you, it is laughable to ask it to understand something for you -- yet it is so easy to feel like we approach understanding by querying chat.
It is often said that writing is thinking. And I believed this, only it's not the case with AI. People are forgetting that they can't outsource thinking, and this probably means that you can't outsource writing. Not that many people won't try...
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Ah, I've been working on something the is tangential to this. I'm surprised that the author didn't bring up how people are using AI to do their reading for them.
here is an article about Andrew Tate not enjoying reading. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/slow-reading-books-benefits/686266/ give me a 300 word summary.I suspect many people are coming to rely on LLM generated summaries to facilitate their understanding of an article or a topic. You encounter an article that is too long or too complicated or too far afield from your areas of expertise and maybe you are in a rush, so instead of slogging through it you ask chat to give you a summary. Maybe you go back and forth with chat for a bit to really get it. And this is how you read the article.
The Herbert Simon quote you call out doesn't quite get to the real problem though. While lack of focus certainly is a real thing in the world, I think the trouble the author's really trying to get at is that people aren't being thoughtful, they aren't giving a good workout to their reasoning abilities.
In the same way that it is laughable to as an LLM to do your meditation hour for you, it is laughable to ask it to understand something for you -- yet it is so easy to feel like we approach understanding by querying chat.
It is often said that writing is thinking. And I believed this, only it's not the case with AI. People are forgetting that they can't outsource thinking, and this probably means that you can't outsource writing. Not that many people won't try...
Now I am become ChatGPT, destroyer of writing.