Are we slipping in our intellectual abilities? Have we lost the ability to read, reason, analyze, and more importantly pay attention?
Over the past decade we have seen a deluge of challenges – from Covid and its disruptive effect on education, to the rising use of screens and smart phones to the more recent threat from LLMs and an increasingly proficient set of AI tools that threaten to compete with and ultimately replace humans in almost every dimension. Each of these threats is nuanced and subjective, but we are starting to see patterns emerge in terms of the impact on our attention span, and ability to think critically and absorb new information.