SEQUENCER

Chatbots won’t obliterate everyone’s critical thinking. Lessons from the past tech revolutions and today’s experts signal how to protect your mind.

A couple months ago, while I was thumbing through old magazines at a record shop, I landed on a gem. “Learning To Love the Computer” emblazoned the cover of Nutshell magazine, a now-defunct periodical for college students. This 1981 issue showed a desk littered with books about Shakespeare, some chips, a Coke can, a boxy PC displaying the start of a homework assignment, and a college student grinning widely. I grinned back. Then I bought the issue.

“You’d better hurry up and learn to love them, because they’re rapidly reshaping our world,” the story said of PCs. Computers changed how we worked and socialized as they swallowed steadily larger bites of tasks previously reserved for typewriters, pens, and minds. That momentum has not stopped. And as generative AI gobbles up internet functions from research to retail, our professional and personal lives also invariably shift.

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