我们是否生活在愚蠢的黄金时代？

Are we living in a golden age of stupidity?

我们是否生活在愚蠢的黄金时代？

From brain-rotting videos to AI creep, every technological advance seems to make it harder to work, remember, think and function independently …

从令人大脑腐烂的视频到人工智能的蔓延，每一次技术进步似乎都使独立工作、记忆、思考和运作变得更加困难……

Sophie McBain

索菲·麦克贝恩

Sat 18 Oct 2025 11.00 BST

2025年10月18日星期六 11:00 BST

Step into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in Cambridge, US, and the future feels a little closer. Glass cabinets display prototypes of weird and wonderful creations, from tiny desktop robots to a surrealist sculpture created by an AI model prompted to design a tea set made from body parts. In the lobby, an AI waste-sorting assistant named Oscar can tell you where to put your used coffee cup. Five floors up, research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna has been working on wearable brain-computer interfaces she hopes will one day enable people who cannot speak, due to neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, to communicate using their minds.

秒走进位于美国剑桥的麻省理工学院（MIT）媒体实验室，未来仿佛更近了一步。玻璃柜里陈列着各种奇特而奇妙的创作原型，从微型桌面机器人，到由人工智能模型创作的超现实主义雕塑，后者受人体器官启发设计了一套茶具。在大厅里，一位名叫奥斯卡（Oscar）的人工智能垃圾分类助手可以告诉你把用过的咖啡杯放在哪里。在五层楼上，研究科学家娜塔莉亚·科斯米娜（Nataliya Kosmyna）一直在研究可穿戴的脑机接口，她希望有一天，这些接口能够帮助那些因肌萎缩侧索硬化症等神经退行性疾病而无法说话的人用他们的思想进行交流。

Kosmyna spends a lot of her time reading and analysing people’s brain states. Another project she is working on is a wearable device – one prototype looks like a pair of glasses – that can tell when someone is getting confused or losing focus. Around two years ago, she began receiving out-of-the blue emails from strangers who reported that they had started using large language models such as ChatGPT and felt their brain had changed as a result. Their memories didn’t seem as good – was that even possible, they asked her? Kosmyna herself had been struck by how quickly people had already begun to rely on generative AI. She noticed colleagues using ChatGPT at work, and the applications she received from researchers hoping to join her team started to look different. Their emails were longer and more formal and, sometimes, when she interviewed candidates on Zoom, she noticed they kept pausing before responding and looking off to the side – were they getting AI to help them, she wondered, shocked. And if they were using AI, how much did they even understand of the answers they were giving?

科斯米娜花费大量时间解读和分析人们的大脑状态。她正在进行的另一个项目是一款可穿戴设备——一个原型看起来像一副眼镜——它可以感知一个人何时感到困惑或注意力不集中。大约两年前，她开始收到陌生人发来的突如其来的电子邮件，这些邮件称他们开始使用ChatGPT之类的大型语言模型，并感觉自己的大脑因此发生了变化。他们的记忆力似乎变差了——他们问她，这真的可能吗？科斯米娜本人也对人们如此迅速地开始依赖生成式人工智能感到震惊。她注意到同事们在工作中使用ChatGPT，而她收到的希望加入她团队的研究人员的申请也开始变得不一样。他们的邮件更长、更正式。有时，当她在Zoom上面试应聘者时，她注意到他们在回复之前会不停地停顿，并且看向一边——她不禁感到震惊，想知道他们是不是在利用人工智能来帮助他们。如果他们真的使用了人工智能，那么他们究竟理解了多少自己给出的答案？

With some MIT colleagues, Kosmyna set up an experiment that used an electroencephalogram to monitor people’s brain activity while they wrote essays, either with no digital assistance, or with the help of an internet search engine, or ChatGPT. She found that the more external help participants had, the lower their level of brain connectivity, so those who used ChatGPT to write showed significantly less activity in the brain networks associated with cognitive processing, attention and creativity.

科斯米娜与麻省理工学院的一些同事合作开展了一项实验，利用脑电图监测受试者在写作时的大脑活动。受试者要么完全不使用数字辅助工具，要么借助互联网搜索引擎或ChatGPT进行写作。她发现，受试者获得的外部帮助越多，大脑连通性水平就越低，因此，使用ChatGPT写作的受试者大脑中与认知处理、注意力和创造力相关的网络活动明显较少。

In other words, whatever the people using ChatGPT felt was going on inside their brains, the scans showed there wasn’t much happening up there.

换句话说，无论使用 ChatGPT 的人感觉到他们的大脑内部发生了什么，扫描结果都显示那里并没有发生太多事情。

The study’s participants, who were all enrolled at MIT or nearby universities, were asked, right after they had handed in their work, if they could recall what they had written. “Barely anyone in the ChatGPT group could give a quote,” Kosmyna says. “That was concerning, because you just wrote it and you do not remember anything.”

这项研究的参与者均就读于麻省理工学院或附近的大学。在他们提交作业后，研究人员立即询问他们是否能回忆起自己写的内容。“ChatGPT 小组几乎没有人能说出原文，”科斯米娜说。“这很令人担忧，因为你刚写完，什么都不记得了。”

Kosmyna is 35, trendily dressed in a blue shirt dress and a big, multicoloured necklace, and she speaks faster than most people can think. As she observes, writing an essay requires skills that are important in our wider lives: the ability to synthesise information, consider competing perspectives and construct an argument. You use these skills in everyday conversations. “How are you going to deal with that? Are you going to be, like, ‘Err … can I just check my phone?’” she says.

科斯米娜35岁，穿着时髦的蓝色衬衫裙，戴着一条五彩缤纷的大项链，说话的速度比大多数人的思维速度都快。正如她所观察到的，写一篇文章需要一些在我们日常生活中至关重要的技能：整合信息、考虑不同观点以及构建论点的能力。你在日常对话中会用到这些技能。“你该怎么应对这种情况？你会不会说，‘呃……我可以看看手机吗？’”她说。

The experiment was small (54 participants) and has not yet been peer reviewed. In June, however, Kosmyna posted it online, thinking other researchers might find it interesting, and then she went about her day, unaware that she had just created an international media frenzy.

这项实验规模很小（54名参与者），而且尚未经过同行评审。然而，今年6月，科斯米娜把实验结果发布到了网上，以为其他研究人员可能会感兴趣，然后就继续了自己的日常工作，完全没有意识到自己已经引发了国际媒体的轰动。

Alongside the journalist requests, she received more than 4,000 emails from around the world, many from stressed-out teachers who feel their students aren’t learning properly because they are using ChatGPT to do their homework. They worry AI is creating a generation who can produce passable work but don’t have any usable knowledge or understanding of the material.

除了记者的请求外，她还收到了来自世界各地的4000多封电子邮件，其中很多来自压力重重的老师，他们觉得学生因为使用ChatGPT做作业而学习效果不佳。他们担心人工智能正在创造一个可以写出还过得去的作业，但却缺乏任何实用知识或理解力的一代人。

The fundamental issue, Kosmyna says, is that as soon as a technology becomes available that makes our lives easier, we’re evolutionarily primed to use it. “Our brains love shortcuts, it’s in our nature. But your brain needs friction to learn. It needs to have a challenge.”

科斯米娜说，根本问题在于，一旦一项技术出现，让我们的生活更加便捷，我们就会从进化的角度去利用它。“我们的大脑喜欢走捷径，这是天性。但你的大脑需要摩擦才能学习。它需要挑战。”

If brains need friction but also instinctively avoid it, it’s interesting that the promise of technology has been to create a “frictionless” user experience, to ensure that, provided we slide from app to app or screen to screen, we will meet no resistance. The frictionless user experience is why we unthinkingly offload ever more information and work to our digital devices; it’s why internet rabbit holes are so easy to fall down and so hard to climb out of; it’s why generative AI has already integrated itself so completely into most people’s lives.

如果大脑需要摩擦，但又本能地避免摩擦，那么有趣的是，科技的承诺一直是创造一种“无摩擦”的用户体验，确保我们在应用程序之间、屏幕之间切换时不会遇到任何阻力。正是这种无摩擦的用户体验，让我们不假思索地将越来越多的信息和工作转移到数字设备上；也正是这种无摩擦的用户体验，让我们如此容易掉进互联网的“兔子洞”却又如此难以爬出；也正是这种无摩擦的用户体验，让我们如此彻底地融入了大多数人的生活。

We know, from our collective experience, that once you become accustomed to the hyperefficient cybersphere, the friction-filled real world feels harder to deal with. So you avoid phone calls, use self-checkouts, order everything from an app; you reach for your phone to do the maths sum you could do in your head, to check a fact before you have to dredge it up from memory, to input your destination on Google maps and travel from A to B on autopilot. Maybe you stop reading books because maintaining that kind of focus feels like friction; maybe you dream of owning a self-driving car. Is this the dawn of what the writer and education expert Daisy Christodoulou calls a “stupidogenic society”, a parallel to an obesogenic society, in which it is easy to become stupid because machines can think for you?

我们从集体经验中得知，一旦你习惯了高效的网络世界，就会觉得充满摩擦的现实世界更难应对。于是，你会避免打电话，使用自助结账，用应用程序订购所有东西；你会拿起手机进行心算，在需要从记忆中挖掘之前先核对一个事实，在谷歌地图上输入目的地，然后自动从 A 点前往 B 点。也许你会停止读书，因为保持这种专注感觉像是一种摩擦；也许你梦想拥有一辆自动驾驶汽车。这是否就是作家兼教育专家黛西·克里斯托杜卢所说的“致愚社会”的曙光？它与“致胖社会”相对应，在这个社会中，由于机器可以代替你思考，人们很容易变得愚蠢？

AI companies are determined to push their products on to the public before we fully understand the psychological and cognitive costs

在我们完全了解心理和认知成本之前，人工智能公司决心将其产品推向公众

Human intelligence is too broad and varied to be reduced to words such as “stupid”, but there are worrying signs that all this digital convenience is costing us dearly. Across the economically developed countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Pisa scores, which measure 15-year-olds’ reading, maths and science, tended to peak around 2012. While over the 20th century IQ scores increased globally, perhaps due to improved access to education and better nutrition, in many developed countries they appear to have been declining.

人类智力范围广泛，种类繁多，难以用“愚蠢”这样的词来概括。但令人担忧的迹象表明，所有这些数字化便利正让我们付出高昂的代价。在经济合作与发展组织（OECD）的经济发达国家中，衡量15岁青少年阅读、数学和科学能力的国际学生评估项目（PISA）分数往往在2012年左右达到峰值。尽管在20世纪，全球范围内的智商分数有所提高，这或许是由于教育机会的增加和营养状况的改善，但在许多发达国家，智商分数似乎一直在下降。

Falling test and IQ scores are the subject of hot debate. What is harder to dispute is that, with every technological advance, we deepen our dependence on digital devices and find it harder to work or remember or think or, frankly, function without them. “It’s only software developers and drug dealers who call people users,” Kosmyna mutters at one point, frustrated at AI companies’ determination to push their products on to the public before we fully understand the psychological and cognitive costs.

考试成绩和智商下降一直是人们热议的。更难以辩驳的是，随着每一次技术进步，我们对数字设备的依赖也日益加深，如果没有它们，我们工作、记忆、思考，甚至??坦白说，生活都变得越来越困难。“只有软件开发者和毒贩才会把人称为用户，”科斯米娜一度低声嘀咕，她对人工智能公司执意要把产品推向公众感到沮丧，而我们却还没有完全理解这些产品的心理和认知成本。

In the ever-expanding, frictionless online world, you are first and foremost a user: passive, dependent. In the dawning era of AI-generated misinformation and deepfakes, how will we maintain the scepticism and intellectual independence we’ll need? By the time we agree that our minds are no longer our own, that we simply cannot think clearly without tech assistance, how much of us will be left to resist?

在不断扩张、无摩擦的网络世界中，你首先是一个用户：被动且依赖。在人工智能生成的虚假信息和深度伪造的黎明时代，我们将如何保持必要的怀疑精神和思想独立性？当我们承认我们的思想不再属于我们自己，没有科技的帮助我们就无法清晰思考时，还有多少人能够抵抗？

Start telling people that you’re worried about what intelligent machines are doing to our brains and there’s a risk that, in the not-too-distant future, everyone will laugh at what a fuddy-duddy you were. Socrates worried that writing would weaken people’s memories and encourage only superficial understanding: not wisdom but “the conceit of wisdom” – an argument that is strikingly similar to many critiques of AI. What happened instead was that writing and the technological advances that followed – the printing press, mass media, the internet era – meant that ever more people had access to ever more information. More people could develop great ideas, and they could share those ideas more easily, and this made us cleverer and more innovative, as individuals and as communities.

秒告诉人们你担心智能机器会对我们的大脑做些什么，那么在不久的将来，每个人都可能会嘲笑你是个老古板。苏格拉底担心写作会削弱人们的记忆，只鼓励肤浅的理解：不是智慧，而是“智慧的自负”——这一论点与许多对人工智能的批评惊人地相似。然而，事实却是，写作以及随之而来的技术进步——印刷机、大众媒体、互联网时代——意味着越来越多的人可以获得更多信息。更多的人可以提出伟大的想法，并且可以更容易地分享这些想法，这使得我们作为个人和社区变得更聪明、更富有创新精神。

After all, writing didn’t only change how we access and retain information; it changed how we think. A person can achieve more complex tasks with a notebook and paper to hand than without: most people can’t work out 53,683 divided by 7 in their head but could have a stab at doing long division on paper. I couldn’t have dictated this piece, but writing helped me organise and clarify my thoughts. As humans, we’re very good at what experts call “cognitive offloading”, namely using our physical environment to reduce our mental load, and this in turn helps us achieve more complex cognitive tasks. Imagine how much harder it would be to function each day without a calendar or phone reminders, or without Google to remember everything for you. In the best case scenario, intelligent people working in partnership with intelligent machines will achieve new intellectual feats and solve tricky problems: we’re already seeing, for instance, how AI can help scientists discover new drugs faster and doctors detect cancer earlier and more efficiently.

毕竟，写作不仅改变了我们获取和保留信息的方式，也改变了我们的思维方式。一个人手边有笔记本和纸比没有笔记本和纸能完成更复杂的任务：大多数人无法心算 53,683 除以 7，但可以尝试在纸上做长除法。我无法口述这篇文章，但写作帮助我组织和理清思路。作为人类，我们非常擅长专家所说的“认知卸载”，即利用我们的物理环境来减轻我们的精神负担，这反过来又帮助我们完成更复杂的认知任务。想象一下，如果没有日历或手机提醒，或者没有谷歌为你记住所有事情，每天的正常生活会变得多么困难。在最好的情况下，聪明的人与智能机器合作将取得新的智力成就并解决棘手的问题：例如，我们已经看到人工智能如何帮助科学家更快地发现新药，医生如何更早、更有效地发现癌症。

The complication is, if technology is truly making us cleverer – turning us into efficient, information-processing machines – why do we spend so much time feeling dumb?

复杂的是，如果技术真的让我们变得更聪明——把我们变成高效的信息处理机器——为什么我们会花这么多时间感觉自己很愚蠢？

Last year, “brain rot” was named Oxford University Press’s word of the year, a term that captures both the specific feeling of mindlessness that descends when we spend too much time scrolling through rubbish online and the corrosive, aggressively dumb content itself, the nonsense memes and AI garble. When we hold our phones we have, in theory, most of the world’s accumulated knowledge at our fingertips, so why do we spend so much time dragging our eyeballs over dreck?

去年，“脑腐烂”（brain rot）被牛津大学出版社评为年度词汇。这个词既指代了我们花太多时间浏览网络垃圾时产生的那种精神恍惚的感觉，也指代了那些腐蚀性极强、极其愚蠢的内容本身，那些无意义的表情包和人工智能的胡言乱语。理论上，当我们拿着手机时，我们触手可及的几乎是世界上积累的大部分知识，那么，为什么我们还要花这么多时间浏览这些垃圾呢？

One issue is that our digital devices have not been designed to help us think more efficiently and clearly; almost everything we encounter online has been designed to capture and monetise our attention. Each time you reach for your phone with the intention of completing a simple, discrete, potentially self-improving task, such as checking the news, your primitive hunter-gatherer brain confronts a multibillion-pound tech industry devoted to throwing you off course and holding your attention, no matter what. To extend Christodoulou ’s metaphor, in the same way that one feature of an obesogenic society are food deserts – whole neighbourhoods in which you cannot buy a healthy meal – large parts of the internet are information deserts, in which the only available brain food is junk.

一个问题是，我们的数字设备并非旨在帮助我们更高效、更清晰地思考；我们在网上遇到的几乎所有东西都是为了吸引和货币化我们的注意力。每次你拿起手机，打算完成一个简单、独立、可能自我提升的任务，比如查看新闻，你原始的狩猎采集大脑就会遭遇一个价值数十亿英镑的科技产业，这个产业致力于让你偏离轨道，不惜一切代价吸引你的注意力。延伸一下 Christodoulou 的比喻，正如肥胖社会的一个特征是食物荒漠——在整个社区你都买不到健康的食物——互联网的大部分是信息荒漠，其中唯一可用的大脑食物就是垃圾食品。

Digital multitasking gives you a false sense of being on top of things without ever getting to the bottom of anything

数字多任务处理会给你一种错觉，让你以为自己掌控了一切，却从未真正了解任何事情

In the late 90s the tech consultant Linda Stone, who was working as a professor at New York University, noticed that her students were using technology very differently from her colleagues at Microsoft, where she also worked. While her Microsoft colleagues were disciplined about working on two screens – one for emails, perhaps, and another for Word, or a spreadsheet – her students seemed to be trying to do 20 things at once. She coined the term “continuous partial attention” to describe the stressful, involuntarily state we often find ourselves in when we’re trying to toggle between several cognitively demanding activities, such as responding to emails while on a Zoom call. When I first heard the term I realised that I, like most people I know, live most of my life in a state of continuous partial attention, whether I’m guiltily checking my phone when I’m supposed to be playing with my kids, or incessantly sidetracked by texts and emails when I’m trying to write, or trying to relax while watching Netflix and simultaneously doing an online food shop, still wondering why I feel as chilled-out as an over-microwaved dinner. Digital multitasking makes us feel productive, but this is often illusory. “You have a false sense of being on top of things without ever getting to the bottom of anything,” Stone tells me. It also makes you feel permanently on edge: one study she conducted found that 80% of people experience “screen apnea” when checking their emails: they become so caught up in the endless notifications that they forget to breathe properly. “Your fight or flight system becomes up-regulated, because you’re constantly trying to stay on top of things,” she says, and this hypervigilance has cognitive costs: it makes us more forgetful, worse at making decisions and less attentive.

90年代末，纽约大学教授、科技顾问琳达·斯通（Linda Stone）注意到，她的学生使用科技的方式与她当时在微软工作的同事截然不同。微软的同事们都严格遵守在两个屏幕上工作的规定——一个屏幕用于查看电子邮件，另一个屏幕用于Word或电子表格——而她的学生似乎试图同时做20件事。她创造了“持续性局部注意力”（continuous partial attention）一词，用来描述我们在尝试在几项需要认知的活动之间切换时经常会遇到的那种紧张、不由自主的状态，例如在Zoom会议中回复电子邮件。我第一次听到这个词时，就意识到我和我认识的大多数人一样，一生中的大部分时间都处于持续的部分注意力状态，无论是在应该陪孩子玩耍时内疚地查看手机，还是在试图写作时不断被短信和电子邮件分散注意力，或者一边看 Netflix 一边试图放松，在网上购物，仍然想知道为什么我会像吃一顿微波炉加热过的晚餐一样放松。数字多任务处理让我们感觉高效，但这往往是虚幻的。“你有一种掌控一切的错觉，却从未触及任何事情的底线，”斯通告诉我。它还会让你感到永久的紧张：她进行的一项研究发现，80% 的人在查看电子邮件时会出现“屏幕呼吸暂停”：他们会被无休止的通知所困扰，以至于忘记了正常呼吸。她说：“你的战斗或逃跑系统会变得高度紧张，因为你总是试图掌控一切。”这种过度警惕会带来认知成本：它会让我们变得更加健忘、决策能力下降、注意力下降。

Continuous partial attention helps explain both brain rot as a mental state – because what is it if not cognitive overwhelm, the point at which you stop resisting the onslaught of digital distraction and allow your brain to rest in the internet’s warm, murky shallows? – and the existence of the online slop itself. After all, what matters to tech companies financially is not that you want to be reading what you’re reading, or that you love what you listen to or what you’re looking at, only that you are unwilling or unable to pull yourself away. This is why streaming services such as Netflix crank out bland, formulaic films that are euphemistically labelled “casual viewing” and are literally designed for viewers who aren’t really watching, and Spotify playlists are filled with generic stock music by fake artists, to provide background music, “Chill Out” or “Party” vibes, for listeners who aren’t really listening. In short, the modern internet doesn’t necessarily make you an idiot, but it definitely primes you to act like one.

持续的部分注意力有助于解释大脑衰退作为一种精神状态——因为如果不是认知超负荷，那又是什么呢？它指的是你不再抵抗数字干扰的冲击，让你的大脑在互联网温暖而浑浊的浅滩上休息？——以及网络垃圾本身的存在。毕竟，对科技公司来说，财务上重要的不是你想读你正在读的东西，也不是你喜欢你听的东西或你正在看的东西，而是你不愿或无法抽离自己。这就是为什么Netflix等流媒体服务会推出平淡无奇、公式化的电影，委婉地贴上“休闲观看”的标签，实际上是为那些并非真正在看的观众设计的；Spotify的播放列表中充斥着虚假艺术家创作的普通库存音乐，为那些并非真正在听的听众提供背景音乐、“放松”或“派对”的氛围。简而言之，现代互联网并不一定会让你变成白痴，但它肯定会让你像个白痴一样行事。

It is into this climate that generative AI arrived, with an entirely novel offer. Until recently you could only outsource remembering and some data processing to technology; now you can outsource thinking itself. Given that we spend most of our lives feeling overstimulated and frazzled, it’s little wonder that so many have jumped at the chance to let a computer do more things we would have once done for ourselves– such as write work reports or emails, or plan a holiday. As we transition from the internet era to the AI era, what we’re consuming is not only ever more low-value, ultra-processed information, but more information that is essentially predigested, delivered in a way that is designed to bypass important human functions, such as assessing, filtering and summarising information, or actually considering a problem rather than finessing the first solution presented to us.

我正是在这样的环境下，生成式人工智能应运而生，带来了一项全新的服务。此前，人们只能将记忆和部分数据处理外包给技术；而现在，人们可以将思考本身外包出去。鉴于我们一生中的大部分时间都处于过度刺激和疲惫的状态，难怪许多人都跃跃欲试，希望让计算机做更多我们曾经自己做的事情——比如撰写工作报告或电子邮件，或者计划假期。随着我们从互联网时代过渡到人工智能时代，我们所消费的信息不仅是越来越多的低价值、过度加工的信息，而且是越来越多本质上经过预先消化的信息，其传递方式旨在绕过人类的重要功能，例如评估、过滤和总结信息，或者真正思考问题，而不是巧妙地处理我们收到的第一个解决方案。

Michael Gerlich, head of the Centre for Strategic Corporate Foresight and Sustainability at SBS Swiss Business School, began studying the impact of generative AI on critical thinking because he noticed the quality of classroom discussions decline. Sometimes he’d set his students a group exercise, and rather than talk to one another they continued to sit in silence, consulting their laptops. He spoke to other lecturers, who had noticed something similar. Gerlich recently conducted a study, involving 666 people of various ages, and found those who used AI more frequently scored lower on critical thinking. (As he notes, to date his work only provides evidence for a correlation between the two: it’s possible that people with lower critical thinking abilities are more likely to trust AI, for example.)

SBS瑞士商学院战略企业远见与可持续发展中心主任迈克尔·格利希 (Michael Gerlich) 开始研究生成式人工智能对批判性思维的影响，因为他注意到课堂讨论的质量下降。有时，他会给学生布置小组练习，学生们不互相交流，而是默默地坐着，看着笔记本电脑。他与其他讲师交流后发现，他们也注意到了类似的情况。格利希最近进行了一项研究，涉及666名不同年龄段的人，发现更频繁使用人工智能的人在批判性思维方面得分较低。（正如他指出的，迄今为止，他的研究仅提供了两者之间存在相关性的证据：例如，批判性思维能力较低的人可能更容易信任人工智能。）

Are schools equipped to produce creative thinkers – or is the education system going to churn out mindless, AI-essay writing drones?

学校是否有能力培养具有创造性思维的人？还是教育系统只会培养出那些无脑的、用人工智能写论文的机器人？

Like many researchers, Gerlich believes that, used in the right way, AI can make us cleverer and more creative – but the way most people use it produces bland, unimaginative, factually questionable work. One concern is the so-called “anchoring effect”. If you post a question to generative AI, the answer it gives you sets your brain on a certain mental path and makes you less likely to consider alternative approaches. “I always use the example: imagine a candle. Now, AI can help you improve the candle. It will be the brightest ever, burn the longest, be very cheap and amazing looking, but it will never develop to the lightbulb,” he says. To get from the candle to a lightbulb you need a human who is good at critical thinking, someone who might take a chaotic, unstructured, unpredictable approach to problem solving. When, as has happened in many workplaces, companies roll out tools such as the chatbot Copilot without offering decent AI training, they risk producing teams of passable candle-makers in a world that demands high-efficiency lightbulbs.

与许多研究人员一样，格利希认为，如果使用得当，人工智能可以让我们变得更聪明、更有创造力——但大多数人使用它的方式却产出平淡无奇、缺乏想象力、事实可信的作品。其中一个令人担忧的问题是所谓的“锚定效应”。如果你向生成式人工智能提出一个问题，它给出的答案会让你的大脑走上某种思维路径，让你不太可能考虑其他方法。“我总是用这个例子：想象一支蜡烛。现在，人工智能可以帮助你改进这支蜡烛。它会是最亮的，燃烧时间最长的，价格低廉，外观惊艳，但它永远不会发展成灯泡，”他说。要从蜡烛变成灯泡，你需要一个善于批判性思考的人，一个可能采取混乱、非结构化、不可预测的方式来解决问题的人。当公司像许多工作场所那样，在没有提供像样的人工智能培训的情况下推出聊天机器人Copilot之类的工具时，他们就有可能在一个需要高效灯泡的世界里，培养出一支勉强合格的蜡烛制造团队。

There is also the bigger issue that adults who use AI as a shortcut have at least benefited from going through the education system in the years before it was possible to get a computer to write your homework for you. One recent British survey found that 92% of university students use AI, and about 20% have used AI to write all or part of an assignment for them. Under these circumstances, how much are they learning? Are schools and universities still equipped to produce creative, original thinkers who will build better, more intelligent societies – or is the education system going to churn out mindless, gullible, AI essay-writing drones?

还有一个更大的问题是，那些把人工智能当作捷径的成年人，至少在计算机代写作业成为可能之前的几年里，从教育体系中受益匪浅。英国最近的一项调查发现，92%的大学生使用人工智能，约20%的学生曾使用人工智能为他们完成全部或部分作业。在这种情况下，他们究竟学到了多少？学校和大学是否仍然具备培养富有创造力、独创性思维的人的能力，从而构建更美好、更智能的社会？还是说，教育体系只会大量生产出那些愚蠢、易受骗的、像人工智能一样写论文的“无人机”？

Some years ago, Matt Miles, a psychology teacher at a high school in Virginia in the US, was sent on a training programme on tech in schools. The teachers were shown a video in which a schoolgirl is caught checking her phone during lessons. In the video, she looks up and says, “You think I’m just on TikTok or playing games. I’m actually in a research room talking to a water researcher from Botswana for a project.”

秒几年前，美国弗吉尼亚州一所高中的心理学老师马特·迈尔斯（Matt Miles）被派去参加一个关于学校科技的培训项目。老师们观看了一段视频，视频中一名女学生被发现在上课时查看手机。视频中，她抬起头说：“你以为我只是在玩抖音或玩游戏吗？实际上，我正在研究室里，和一位来自博茨瓦纳的水资源研究人员讨论一个项目。”

“It’s laughable. You show it to the kids and they all laugh, right?” Miles says. Alarmed at the disconnect between how policymakers view tech in education and what teachers were seeing in the classroom, in 2017 Miles and his colleague Joe Clement, who teaches economics and government at the same school, published Screen Schooled, a book that argued that technology overuse is making kids dumber. In the years since, smartphones have been banned from their classrooms, but students still work from their laptops. “We had one kid tell us, and I think it was pretty insightful, ‘If you see me on my phone, there’s a 0% chance I’m doing something productive. If you see me on my laptop, there’s a 50% chance,’” Miles says.

“这太可笑了。你把它给孩子们看，他们都会笑，对吧？”迈尔斯说。由于对政策制定者对教育科技的看法与教师在课堂上看到的情况之间的差距感到震惊，2017 年，迈尔斯和他的同事乔·克莱门特（在同一所学校教授经济学和政府学）出版了《Screen Schooled》一书，认为过度使用科技正在让孩子变笨。在那之后的几年里，智能手机被禁止带入课堂，但学生们仍然使用笔记本电脑学习。“有一个孩子告诉我们，我认为这很有见地，‘如果你看到我在玩手机，那么我做的事情有效率的可能性为 0%。如果你看到我在玩笔记本电脑，那么可能性就有 50%，’”迈尔斯说。

In essence what is happening with these technologies is we’re experimenting on children

本质上，这些技术正在对儿童进行实验

Until the pandemic, many teachers were “rightly sceptical” about the benefits of introducing more technology into the classroom, Faith Boninger, a researcher at the University of Colorado, observes, but when lockdowns forced schools to go online, a new normal was created, and ed tech platforms such as Google Workspace for Education, Kahoot! and Zearn became ubiquitous. With the spread of generative AI came new promises that it could revolutionise education and usher in an era of personalised student learning, while also reducing the workload for teachers. But almost all the research that has found benefits to introducing tech in classrooms is funded by the ed-tech industry, and most large-scale independent research has found that screen time gets in the way of achievement. A global OECD study found, for instance, that the more students use tech in schools, the worse their results. “There is simply no independent evidence at scale for the effectiveness of these tools … in essence what is happening with these technologies is we’re experimenting on children,” says Wayne Holmes, a professor of critical studies of artificial intelligence and education at University College London. “Most sensible people would not go into a bar and meet somebody who says, ‘Hey, I’ve got this new drug. It’s really good for you’ – and just use it. Generally, we expect our medicines to be rigorously tested, we expect them to be prescribed to us by professionals. But suddenly when we’re talking about ed tech, which apparently is very beneficial for children’s developing brains, we don’t need to do that.”

科罗拉多大学研究员 Faith Boninger 观察到，在疫情爆发之前，许多教师对在课堂上引入更多技术的好处“持怀疑态度”，但当封锁迫使学校转为线上授课时，一种新的常态诞生了，Google Workspace for Education、Kahoot! 和 Zearn 等教育技术平台变得无处不在。随着生成式人工智能的普及，它有望彻底改变教育，开创学生个性化学习的时代，同时还能减轻教师的工作量。但几乎所有发现在课堂上引入技术益处的研究都是由教育技术行业资助的，而且大多数大规模独立研究发现，屏幕时间会妨碍学业。例如，经合组织的一项全球研究发现，学生在学校使用科技越多，他们的成绩越差。 “根本没有大规模的独立证据证明这些工具的有效性……本质上，这些技术就是在儿童身上做实验，”伦敦大学学院人工智能与教育批判研究教授韦恩·霍姆斯说道。“大多数理智的人不会走进酒吧，遇到有人说：‘嘿，我有一种新药。对你真的很好’——然后就随便用了。通常，我们期望药物经过严格的测试，期望它们由专业人士开具。但突然之间，当我们谈论教育科技时，它显然对儿童大脑发育非常有益，我们不需要这样做。”

What worries Miles and Clement is not only that their students are permanently distracted by their devices, but that they will not develop critical thinking skills and deep knowledge when quick answers are only a click away. Where once Clement would ask his class a question such as, “Where do you think the US ranks in terms of GDP per capita?” and guide his students as they puzzled over the solution, now someone will have Googled the answer before he’s even finished his question. They know students use ChatGPT constantly and get annoyed if they aren’t provided with a digital copy of their assignment, because then they must type rather than copy and paste the relevant questions into an AI assistant or the Google search bar. “Being able to Google something and providing the right answer isn’t knowledge,” Clement says. “And having knowledge is incredibly important so that when you hear something that’s questionable or maybe fake, you think, ‘Wait a minute, that contradicts all the knowledge I have that says otherwise, right?’ It’s no wonder there’s a bunch of idiots walking about who think that the Earth is flat. Like, if you read a flat Earth blog, you think, ‘Ah, that makes a lot of sense’ because you don’t have any understanding or knowledge.” The internet is already awash with conspiracy and misinformation, something that will only become worse as AI hallucinates and produces plausible fakes, and he worries that young people are poorly equipped to navigate it.

迈尔斯和克莱门特担心的不仅是他们的学生永远被电子设备分散注意力，还在于当快速答案唾手可得时，他们无法培养批判性思维能力和深厚的知识。克莱门特以前会问学生这样的问题：“你认为美国的人均GDP排名是多少？”，并在学生苦苦思索答案时给予指导，但现在，在他提问之前，别人就已经在谷歌上搜索到了答案。他们知道学生们经常使用ChatGPT，如果没有提供作业的电子版，他们会很恼火，因为这样他们就必须把相关问题输入到人工智能助手或谷歌搜索栏中，而不是复制粘贴。“能够用谷歌搜索到正确答案并不是知识，”克莱门特说。“拥有知识非常重要，这样当你听到一些可疑的或可能是虚假的东西时，你就会想，‘等等，这跟我所有认为相反的知识相矛盾，对吧？’”难怪到处都有一群白痴认为地球是平的。就像你读了一篇关于地球平坦的博客，你会想，‘啊，这很有道理’，因为你根本不懂，也不知道相关知识。” 互联网上已经充斥着阴谋论和虚假信息，而随着人工智能产生幻觉并制造出似是而非的虚假信息，这种情况只会变得更糟，他担心年轻人缺乏应对这些情况的能力。

During the pandemic, Miles says, he found his young son weeping over his school-issued tablet. His son was doing an online maths program and he had been tasked with making six using the fewest number of one, three and five tokens. He kept suggesting using two threes, and the computer kept telling him he was wrong. Miles tried one and five, which the computer accepted. “That’s kind of the nightmare you get with a non-human AI, right?” Miles observes: students often approach topics in unanticipated and interesting ways, but machines struggle to cope with idiosyncrasy. Listening to his story, however, I was struck by a different kind of nightmare. Maybe the dawn of the new golden era of stupidity doesn’t begin when we submit to super-intelligent machines; it starts when we hand over power to dumb ones.

迈尔斯说，疫情期间，他发现小儿子对着学校发的平板电脑哭泣。他的儿子正在做在线数学题，题目是使用一、三和五中最少的数字凑成六。他一直建议用两个三，但电脑一直告诉他错了。迈尔斯尝试了一和五，电脑接受了。“这就是非人类人工智能带来的噩梦吧？”迈尔斯观察到：学生们经常以意想不到的有趣方式处理问题，但机器却难以应对他们的怪癖。然而，听着他的故事，我被另一种噩梦所震撼。也许，愚蠢的新黄金时代的曙光不是在我们屈服于超级智能机器时开始的；而是在我们把权力交给愚蠢的机器时开始的。