So, I’m going to start this on two things I’ve seen degrade in people who grew up with computers as a primary source of information versus a secondary source.

First, I’ve seen the ability to look through a document degrade over time as younger people have gotten used to Ctrl+F. The ability to manually look up and scan through a document has degraded. Also, I’ve seen people will then hyperfocus on the paragraph at the detriment of skimming the page.

Second, the ability to read not perfectly legible text has degraded as well. If the document is a poor scan or bad print handwriting, younger people have to practice the skill of reading it which was usually assumed to be had.

So, where do I think this will go in the future with AI?

First, I’m seeing AI used a lot to summarize and those results are being trusted. I see a future where younger people won’t have that ability to process and summarize data because they will be out of practice.

Second, I see the ability to write is going to degrade since people will be out of practice as people rely on AI to write for themselves. That lack of practice is going to have major impacts to critical thinking skills.