Theo Baker, What A.I. Did to My College Class, NYTimes, May 17, 2026.
Over half-way through the article:
Emerging research has begun to show what most people feel is obvious: Relying on A.I. for cognitive tasks can reduce one’s own intellectual capacity and resilience. It’s one thing to use it in the workplace, but in the classroom, difficulty is often precisely the point. Sure, a robot can lift 600 pounds much more easily than I can — but that doesn’t much help me if I’m trying to work out. The same goes for the thinking exercise of education. However, telling that to students is about as attractive a message as “eat your veggies” or “sleep eight hours.” It feels like scolding.
Even in the heart of the Silicon Valley techno-utopia, most people know that our tech is bad for us, or at least that it can be. A.I. is often a tremendous productivity boost, yet my friends increasingly refer to both short-form video and their A.I. chat logs in the language of addiction. It’s becoming baked in, shaping our generational character. We are a digital generation, growing only more attached to the virtual world.
Interesting. I've been thinking of Silicon Valley AI culture in terms of addiction.
The internet has already allowed us to feel more connected than ever while becoming lonelier than ever. A.I. lets us cut out the human part of human interaction entirely.
When I was sitting in a recent class on love in French fiction — exactly the kind of course that a senior takes before it all comes to an end — I listened to the first student presentation, entitled: “Applying the Gale-Shapley Algorithm to ‘The Princess of Clèves.’” The enterprising presenters sought to resolve the contretemps of the 1678 romantic novel through a computer science matching algorithm. Love was something to “be optimized.” Next to me, one student scribbled on a branded notepad from Hudson River Trading, a quantitative trading firm where fresh graduates can earn upward of $600,000 a year. Another had a sticker on her laptop: “Practice safe C.S.” The class could not have felt more Stanford.
That sounds like idolatry, where the idolator becomes more and more like the idol. See my post, From Atheism to Idolatry, from April 23, where Claude informs me:
The classical meaning of idolatry isn't just worshipping a false god — it's more specifically taking something that is a human creation, a product of human hands and intention, and then inverting the relationship so that the created thing becomes the sovereign over its creators. The idol is made by humans and then humans prostrate themselves before it. That inversion is the core theological offense, not the mere existence of the object.
Which fits the Silicon Valley situation remarkably well. These are systems built by humans, trained on human-generated text and images, designed to optimize for objectives humans specified, running on hardware humans manufactured — and yet a significant portion of the people building them have effectively placed themselves in a posture of submission before them, either in hope or in dread. The creature has become the measure of the creator. [...]
There's also something in the biblical prophetic tradition worth recalling. The critique of idolatry in Isaiah and elsewhere isn't primarily metaphysical — it's not mainly about whether the idol exists. It's about what idol worship does to the worshipper. You become like what you worship — diminished, rigid, less alive. That's a psychological and moral claim, and it applies rather directly to a culture organized around the maximization of machine intelligence as the sovereign value. What kind of humans does that produce?
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