As it is wont to do, the stock market got out a bit ahead of its skis in this whole artificial intelligence craze. When Chinese artificial intelligence developer DeepSeek released its latest AI model, R1, with claims that it could match the performance of OpenAI’s platforms at a fraction of the cost, American tech stocks plummeted.
Indeed, China has been pouring resources into the artificial intelligence race. In late January alone, the country established a 60 billion yuan ($8.2 billion) AI investment fund.
Nothing’s wrong with a little healthy (peaceful) technological competition among nations, and AI is becoming a useful tool in everything from helping doctors more accurately diagnose cancer to ensuring that schoolchildren never have to learn how to write. Yet, we’ve all gotten too excited about the promise of this technology without pausing for a moment to remember that its current iteration is still pretty bad.
Read an article written by AI. The outlets unethical enough to use them are often unethical enough not to label them, but you can tell right away because they are riddled with nonsensical syntax and factual inaccuracies. When it’s trying to write anything at all complex, AI just plasters over gaps it can’t otherwise fill with lies. ChatGPT came out in 2022. It’s definitely gotten better since then. Improvements aside, after nearly three years of development it’s not anywhere close to being able to fully replace a well-educated human.
I have no doubt that someday AI will permeate the economy. For now, though, and for a long time, it’s going to be limited to making certain things marginally easier for certain people. Frequently this is a good thing, like when it helps a medical professional find a cancerous growth earlier or when it saves someone a few thousand dollars that they’d otherwise have to pay a lawyer to dig through a pile of documents. And frequently it’s a bad thing, like when it prevents an entire generation from learning how to think.
Some things are supposed to be hard. I taught legal writing for three years. That class was not about teaching future lawyers to write beautifully (well, it was only partially about that, I admit it was very satisfying to see the students’ writing from the start of fall semester to the end of spring semester become increasing more eloquent). The vast majority of lawyers will never, in their actual legal careers, need to do the kind of writing I taught in that class, given that most lawyers, rather than writing persuasive briefs for use in litigation, will be drafting wills and trusts, shepherding real estate deals along, advising corporate clients, or doing any of the million other things lawyers do that is not litigation writing. The class was still important though because learning how to explain something very complex in writing will train you to be able to think about such things much more functionally than hearing or even reading about the same thing ever will.
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It’s like having a junior associate who’s never off the clock.
Even at a young age — maybe especially at a young age — people need to learn how to write to learn how to think. Whether any given individual ever intends to or ever does directly make a penny from writing anything, this is not something we should outsource to the machines.
Investing further in artificial intelligence is fine. We should keep doing that, and keep trying to stay ahead of China in the AI race. But what if we also funded a huge national reserve of actual intelligence?
Consider how much better we’d be doing than China on AI, and everything else, if our population as a whole could dramatically out-think China’s. Throwing money at schools is not a panacea. Kids, and later young adults, have to want to learn.
This would involve a reimagining of our culture, not just in schools. It would mean imposing the necessarily harsh regulations on tech platforms that lawmakers have been too cowardly to impose for well over a decade, so that maybe we wouldn’t have almost a third of our kids saying they want to be YouTube stars when they grow up. They could instead go back to wanting to be astronauts, or even, fine, actors. It would mean parents parenting a lot more — for instance, simply not buying their children tablets and smartphones, just like how you parents out there already don’t buy your kids alcohol or cigarettes (I hope) no matter how much they beg and plead. More than anything, it would mean reimposing learning for learning’s sake — expending effort to improve your mind with or without an immediate material reward — as a cultural value. Perhaps this could supplant the glorification of deliberate ignorance as a cultural value.
None of that is going to happen anytime soon. Until we decide as a nation that developing actual intelligence should be just as much of a priority as developing artificial intelligence, I don’t know, calm yourself with an episode of Ologies with Alie Ward and resist letting the machines seize your attention to sell you more crap you don’t need. For now, our collective deficit of thinking skills will keep being exploited to the grave detriment of all.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].