Just read this fascinating article in The New Yorker

What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?

The demise of the English paper will end a long intellectual tradition, but it’s also an opportunity to reëxamine the purpose of higher education.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/07/07/the-end-of-the-english-paper

Takeaways:

🔄 A.I. shifts our opportunity costs. “College is all about opportunity costs.” Students today spend far less time on schoolwork than in decades past. In the early 60s, college students spent an estimated 24 hours a week on schoolwork. Today, that figure is about 15 hours. With tools like ChatGPT, what used to take hours now takes minutes. But what are we giving up when we outsource the messy, formative process of thinking?

⚡ The intoxication of hyperefficiency. Most students start using A.I. as an organizer aid but quickly evolve to off-loading their thinking altogether. Moreover, they describe using it like social media: constantly open, constantly tempting. Are we becoming so efficient that we forget why we’re thinking in the first place?

✍️ Yes, typing is fast… “but neuroscientists have found that the “embodied experience” of writing by hand taps into parts of the brain that typing does not. Being able to write one way—even if it’s more efficient—doesn’t make the other way obsolete.”

🧍‍♂️ What does it mean to “sound like ourselves”? As AI gets better at sounding like us, do we risk forgetting what we sound like in the first place?

📉 Is Cognitive decline associated to A.I.? According to a recent study from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, human intellect has declined. The assessment of tens of thousands of adults across 31 countries showed an over-all decade-long drop in test scores for math and for reading comprehension. Andreas Schleicher, the director for education and skills at the O.E.C.D., hypothesized that the way we consume information today—often through short social-media posts—has something to do with the decline in literacy.