The Real Threat to Humanity: Our Dying Ability to Think Link to YT vid The Erosion of Critical Thinking Will Doom Us Long Before AI While everyone debates whether AI will destroy us, we're missing the crisis already unfolding: the collapse of critical thinking itself. SAT reading scores have plummeted for two decades. College students can't distinguish arguments from opinions. Online discourse has devolved into performance art optimized for outrage and speed. We've created a culture that rewards takes over texts, brevity over precision, and emotional reactions over careful reasoning. Platforms like TikTok train our brains to expect cognitive ease, making anything requiring interpretive labor feel elitist or boring. The average person now spends more time swiping than reading, more time reacting than reasoning. The irony runs deeper: we have access to AI tools that could sharpen our thinking, but instead we're using them to skip thinking altogether. People cite AI ou...
