AI is accelerating the decline of literacy and impoverishing the English language, but as concerning as these changes are, they are but one component of society’s slide toward irreversible dependence on a technology owned by a few huge companies.
Dependency surely is their strategy. Immense capital is being invested in AI. Short of broad human dependency, they won’t make their money back.
During a time of economic growth, about 700,000 mostly white-collar U.S. workers were laid off in the first five months of the year, an 80 percent increase over the previous year. Many firms announced this will accelerate: Ford’s CEO predicted that half of white-collar workers will be replaced by AI, at his company and across the economy.
If you haven’t worked with the latest AI and asked it some tough questions, you don’t know. These machines are incredible. They’re already better than humans at most tasks, even social perception, and they’re rapidly getting smarter.
A friend related what this is like on the inside, as whole corporate teams are eliminated and their duties reassigned to survivors who can only keep up by using AI ever more extensively—while knowing AI will take their jobs next.
Soon, such a company will not be able to function without AI. That’s when AI’s corporate titans can stop giving away their products and start recovering the trillions they are investing. Once dependent, we’ll have to pay whatever they demand.
Dependency comes when we have forgotten how to reverse the process. Writing is an example. I’ve recently written about the literacy decline in three newsletters: about language, about politics, and about global reading scores. Tests and other literacy measures reflect the loss across age groups.
Students who use AI in school learn to use AI—not how to read, write, or think. Professors report their students have stopped reading books. AI does more than summarize the content, it also ‘compares and contrasts’ and generates thoughtful comments for class—about the books the students haven’t read.
Future employers won’t have a choice about using AI. Rather than an efficiency boost, the machine will be a necessity for a workforce that never learned to think independently.
Of course, computer dependency is not new. Airlines and banks once used paper timetables and ledgers. Today, if their computers fail, they cannot operate at all.
But AI is a special case—and this is where its defenders miss the point. One often hears, “With each new technology, some jobs are displaced, but new ones are created.”
Perhaps, but here technology is concentrating power in an unprecedented way. No longer will capital vie with labor for the fruits of the economy. When a few billionaires control the ability to think, capital will be all that counts.
Don’t worry about an autonomous AI that conquers the world. Worry instead about the motivation of the men who control these incredible mechanical minds, as they profit from a populace losing its ability to read and write.
And keep writing. Writing not only connects us, it also gives us the tools to think for ourselves.
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