where hope lies

The People Outsourcing Their Thinking to AI – The Atlantic:

James Bedford, an educator at the University of New South Wales who is focused on developing AI strategies for the classroom, started using LLMs almost daily after ChatGPT’s release. Over time, he found that his brain was defaulting to AI for thinking, he told me. One evening, he was trying to help a woman retrieve her AirPod, which had fallen between the seats on the train. He noticed that his first instinct was to ask ChatGPT for a solution. “It was the first time I’d experienced my brain wanting to ask ChatGPT to do cognition that I could just do myself,” he said. That’s when he realized “I’m definitely becoming reliant on this.” After the AirPod incident, he decided to take a month-long break from AI to reset his brain. “It was like thinking for myself for the first time in a long time,” he told me. “As much as I enjoyed that clarity, I still went straight back to AI afterwards.” […]

Ines Lee, an economist based in London, told me that at times she has slipped into the habit of “not being able to start meaningful work without first consulting AI.” On her Substack, Lee has written that ChatGPT and Claude are now more seductive distractions than social-media apps such as YouTube and Instagram: She frequently turns to them to get her work done, even while feeling her critical-thinking skills may be atrophying in the process. Mike Kentz, an educator and AI-literacy consultant, told me that he, similarly, has found himself depending on chatbots for help writing emails. “Areas where I used to feel confident in my own skills and abilities — like writing concise, thorough, balanced emails — have now become areas where I consistently reach out to AI for feedback,” he wrote in a recent blog post. “The 2015 version of me would be quite disturbed.”

But the 2025 version of me is totally chill!

One last time: Everyone knows. Everyone. We really don’t need any more stories explaining what people are doing to themselves. But I think journalists keep writing them because they believe that if they just tell the story often enough people — including themselves — will develop some resistance to Silicon Valley Slop. Isn’t it pretty to think so?

I am just finishing teaching The Brothers Karamazov — a book I once taught every year but had not revisited in a long time — and something that struck me quite forcibly this time was the dramatic change in direction that occurs in Book Ten. After having plunged us for hundreds of pages into the profound pathologies of the Karamazov family and those who orbit it, we now find ourselves in a small community of children: boys who are increasingly attracted to and fascinated by Alyosha. In one sense this development is consistent with the story to that point: the dying Father Zossima has sent his disciple Alyosha out into the world, where he believes the young man’s vocation lies. Not in a contemplative monastic life, but rather a life of “active love” in the messy and chaotic secular world.

Yet it is odd to be immersed in these children’s lives, after spending so much time with the Karamazovs. Some of them are not totally new to us: we met Kolya and Ilushsa much earlier in the book, but we had no reason to think that they would become significant characters. And it’s not common for any novelist to bring peripheral figures to the center of a narrative in the tenth of twelve books.

So why does Dostoevsky do this?

I think I know: because there’s still hope for these kids. Old Fyodor, Ivan, Mitya, Smerdyakov — they’ve gone too far down the path of wickedness to be easily rescued, or in Smerdyakov’s case and the old man’s to be rescued at all. Both Ivan and Mitya are punished in their bodies for the violence they have done to their consciences, and their recovery is not assured. Mitya’s sensuality is less spiritually corrosive than Ivan’s cold intellectual pride, but he has indulged his lusts for so long that the way back for him will be long and hard. And it is hard to have much hope for Ivan — though the fact that he has confessed his sins may be sufficient to expel or at least suppress the demon that has possessed him.

But the boys are another matter. Though they show many of the same traits as the Karamazovs (irrational rage, self-indulgent pride), they have not traveled as far down those paths. Their characters have not yet become fully formed. The intervention of someone like Alyosha in their lives could mean everything to them.

Look, I’m a Christian, I don’t give up on anyone. As I have said many times, my favorite saint is Martin of Tours, who, when Satan appeared to him and told him that he and his fellow monks could not be saved, replied, Not only are we saved, but you too, if you repent of your wickedness, can be redeemed. (How can you not love a guy who sees Satan before him and thinks, What an evangelistic opportunity!) But I also have limited powers and time. We all have to focus our energies where they have the best chance of making a difference.

I look at my students and see the possibility of participating in their intellectual and moral and spiritual formation.

I look at what has captured the minds of the people in that Atlantic article and think: That kind comes out only by prayer and fasting. As I wrote a while back,

I merely wish you, dear reader, to consider the possibility that when a tweet provokes you to wrath, or an Instagram post makes you envious, or some online article sends you to another and yet another in an endless chain of what St. Augustine called curiositas — his favorite example is the gravitational pull on all passers-by of a dead body on the side of the road — you are dealing with powers greater than yours. Your small self and your puny will are overwhelmed by the Cosmic Rulers, the Principalities and Powers. They oppress or possess you, and they can neither be deflected nor, by the mere exercise of will, overcome. Any freedom from what torments us begins with a proper demonology. Later we may proceed to exorcism.