“We Are Watching Critical Thinking Disappear in Real Time” Due to AI Addiction: 40% of Kids Can’t Read, Teachers Quitting in Droves

Yves here. Normally I am loath to have a video as a cross post, but I suspect most of you will agree that this one merits being showcased. It describes the extent and severity of the collapse in critical thinking skills and even basic information acquisition among most children due to device dependence and AI addiction. Teachers are resigning in droves.

The narrator in passing wonders what sort of society is coming, since a minority of children, those of the affluent and above all, the progeny of the tech elite, are being brought in a more traditional way, with no or limited device use until their teens, to acquire fashioned cognitive skills. But what of the rest of the dull eaters? What role if any will be allotted to them?

A conservative colleague said the use of AI to create addiction and device dependency was evil. That is an understatement. These kids rely on ChatGPT not just for information but also to make choices, and for many, that seems to extend to every aspect of their lives. Sam Altman makes clear in video clips below that this extreme loss of independence, of personal autonomy, is deliberate.

That means unless these kids can find a way to break free, they are cognitive serfs that can be told to do anything. How to vote. Whether to sign up to die in a hopeless war. Whether to take a job in a unsafe meatpacking plant and risk loss of limbs.

This widespread abuse is far worse than what the Sacklers and other opioid peddlers did to mainly working class pain victims, or what the British did to China in the Opium Wars. At least with opioid addiction, it is possible for the victims to recover even if the withdrawal process is painful. The evidence is mounting that even for adults, regular use of AI diminishes reasoning skills and attention spans.

These children are being turned into automatons, incapable of independent thought and action. It’s widely known in developmental psychology that if certain patterning does not happen at critical ages, the deficit is permanent. Kittens needing visual input in their first few days or they are blind. Kids who don’t crawl having coordination issues as adults due to missing important movement patterning. Less dramatic versions are not being able to make sounds in foreign languages if you have not heard and practiced them when young.

These young AI addicts are set to be permanently damaged. This is tech bros creating something as permanent and harmful as fetal alcohol syndrome on a mass basis. And they clearly know what they are doing, witness how they raise their children on completely different lines.

We won’t know until these AI-brain-rotted kids grow up, but the extreme dependency discussed widely by teachers looks as if some, perhaps most, will be so wanting in decision-making capacity as to make for ideal slaves. Could they even be instructed to get into a Temple Grandin type killing line, to tamely take a bolt to the brain, when they are of no more use?

Oh, and the babbling from one of the Tik-Tok memes sounded uncomfortably like the vocalizations made by victims of a neuro-linguistic virus, designed to control the population, in the Neal Stephenson novel Snow Crash.

Hat tip to reader fk for this important find.

Mildly edited machine-generated transcript:

Narrator: A fourth grader asked their teacher, “Why do I need to learn how to read if AI can read for me?”

Right now, 40% of fourth graders can’t read. We’re witnessing the collapse of the American education system.

Teacher 1: I teach 8th grade history and I have 110ish students. Two of them are reading on grade level right now. 18 of them are at a kindergarten level. 55 of those students are between a second and fourth grade level.

We were doing guided notes. Supposed to be a real easy day. It was review. They wrote down “Maryland was founded as a safe haven for Catholics.” It was on the board. They wrote it down and before we moved on, I call in a student and I ask, “Hey, where were the Catholics one more time?”

And these students, what they do is they look at me and then they look at their notes and then they look at the board. They look back at their notes and some of them never answered me.

They never figured out the answer. It was wild.

And I kept giving them hints like rephrasing the question and saying like, “It’s in your notes. We just wrote it down. We just wrote it down. Where are the Catholics? It’s on the board.”

And they never got it. They can’t read their own notes. Not and I don’t mean their handwriting. I mean like they can’t they can’t make heads or tails of it on the page.

These kids have a frightening ability for information to go from their eyes to their hands and not pass through the brain at all. What do we do, y’all? That ship is sailing across the ocean and there is no one at the wheel.

Narrator: What she described is terrifying. The information goes through their eyes down through their hands without passing through their brains.

But this isn’t an isolated incident. This is nationwide. I looked up the actual numbers. Only 23% of fourth graders can read at a proficient level. Just 23%.

Then we have the eighth graders. Only 26% are reading proficiently. After all the reforms, adding technology into the classrooms, and debating about funding, we’re now at 40%. We didn’t get better. We made it worse.

Teacher 2: I’ve been teaching since 1993, and yes, we have always had kids who struggle to focus, but what’s happening now is on a whole other level.

Do you remember how it used to feel when the teacher would pull out the cart with the big TV and the VCR attached? Yeah. Not anymore. Now I’ve got kids asking to skip it. They literally can’t just sit and watch.

Narrator: I’m a ’90s kid, so I know exactly what she’s talking about. When that rinky dink TV rolled into the classroom, that was the best day ever. But today’s kids are overstimulated. TV is not cutting it.

When we were growing up, they said we watched too many cartoons. Now kids don’t even want cartoons. It’s not enough stimulation. They get bored.

Kids today are growing up watching Coco Melon and YouTube shorts. Content that’s meant to hold attention for seconds at a time. And now we’re asking them to sit in a classroom for hours with no screens and no stimulation. Of course, they’re going to roam around yelling “six, seven”. They’re having withdrawal symptoms.

Teacher 3: Honey, teaching kids isn’t the same anymore. It’s just not. Used to be kids would listen to teachers simply because they were teachers. That was the respect of it all. Now, uh-uh. No, honey. I got to keep the kids constantly engaged. Not even just engaged, but almost overstimulated. The candy isn’t even working anymore. Giving out candy for positive reinforcement doesn’t even work anymore. They don’t care about that. Girl, I’m using Champzini Benini just to get my kids attention. Just so they’ll look at me. Hello. Hello, girl. Bye. I got kids saying “six seven” repeatedly. They don’t even know how to spell six seven.

Catching me doing this mid mid lecture just to see if they’re paying attention. You watching? Hello? We there girl? It’s so bad now. It’s so bad.

Narrator: TVs don’t work. Candy isn’t working. The only thing that grabs their attention is Tik Tok memes:

Chimpanzini. Banani wah wah wah bananai monkey monkey monkey monkey uchi or shimpi cocoini wah wah wah poop cooni monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey.

Narrator: Despite these apps requiring users to be 13, kids are on them way earlier. One study found that a quarter of kids aged 11 to 15 said they use social media to forget about their problems. 17% said they tried to cut back but couldn’t. These kids are describing addiction. Gen Z was the first generation to grow up on social media. And they’re the most anxious, most depressed, loneliest generation on record.

And now Gen Alpha isn’t just growing up on social media. They also have generative AI. Okay, this is becoming a genuinely concerning issue.

Teacher 4: As a substitute teacher, I am encountering a really concerning number of students who truly do not see any value in learning. Because, as one of the fourth and fifth graders that I was teaching the other day asked me,” Why do I need to know any of this if a computer or AI can do it for me?” A little girl didn’t want to learn how to read because why would she need to when she could have the computer read it to her or when she could just take a picture of her math problem and have the AI do it for her? This is a legitimate issue.

Narrator: Children do not have fully developed reasoning abilities. Their brains just aren’t developed. We can just take a look at the subreddit “Kids are stupid” to see proof that kids do not think long term. They don’t have the mental capacity to fully think through their actions.

So, how is a teacher supposed to convince a student to learn how to read when that student believes that the AI can just read for them? How do they convince them to learn to write when they can talk to chat GPT and it’ll write for them? Spelling, why bother? Grammar, who cares? History, civics, critical thinking. The AI has all the answers. And all a child sees is a path of least resistance. They don’t understand that to struggle is to learn and to grow.

Male Adult: What are you doing?

Toddler: ChatGPT.

Male Adult: I know, but what are you doing?

Toddler: I’m doing I’m doing school.

Male Adult: You’re doing school and ChatGPT.

Toddler: Uh-huh.

Male Adult: How old are you?

Toddler: Three.

Narrator: And what are these children hearing from the adults about AI? AI is going to change everything. AI makes you so much more efficient. AI can do it for you.

Why would a child invest in learning when every adult around them is saying that machines will do it better? We’re creating learned helplessness at scale.

Teacher 5: I’m going to start with saying that teachers are not afraid of AI because we hate technology. We are scared because we are watching critical thinking disappear in real time.

When I was in high school, my math teachers would say, “You got to know how to do this because you’re not going to have a calculator in your pocket.” Well, guess what? I have a calculator in my pocket at all times.

But what I’ve realized is that it’s not a fair comparison because calculators replace computation after we learned how math worked. AI shows up before students ever learn how to think through a problem. What we are witnessing is that students are now incapable in sitting in any kind of intellectual discomfort. And that’s concerning.

Narrator: This is what people miss when they compare AI to calculators. It’s not just math. That’s literally every subject, including thinking itself.

And we now have more research on AI and cognition. Students who use AI show weaker reasoning skills. They accept answers without questioning them. Researchers call it cognitive offloading. They develop this pattern of generating first and thinking later, or really generating first and not thinking at all.

And the scary part is these studies are showing cognitive decline in adults, people with fully developed brains. If AI is doing this to adults, then what is it doing to a brain that’s still forming?

Teachers are responding to the overuse of AI by removing Chromebooks and iPads from the classroom. They’re going back to pencil and paper, the method that we’ve used for hundreds of years because it actually works.

But I want to discuss who’s actually incentivized to have AI in the classrooms. We already know what social media was designed to do and we know the future design because Mark Zuckerberg has been quite open about that. He thinks AI can fill the gaps in your friendships. He’s exploiting the loneliness caused by his own apps.

Then there’s Nome Shazir. He’s the founder of character AI. In an interview, Shazir said, “I joke that we’re not going to replace Google. We’re going to replace your mom.” He wants his AI chatbot to replace mothers. the person who’s supposed to guide you, help you make decisions, and provide you with life advice. He would rather his chatbot do that.

And then there’s Sam Alman. There’s always a Sam Alman quote because the man has never received a podcast invitation that he could turn down.

Sam Altman: People talk about the most personal in their lives to ChatGPT. Young people especially like use it as a therapist, a life coach, having these relationship problems. “What should I do?”

Sam Altman [different interview]: They don’t really make life decisions without asking like ChatGPT what they should do. And it has like the full context on every person in their life and what they’ve talked about.

Sam Altman [different interview]: And there’s young people who just say like, “I can’t make any decision in my life without telling ChatGPT everything that’s going on. It knows me. It knows my friends. I’m going to do whatever it says.

Narrator: These CEOs know exactly what they’re doing. They’re not accidentally replacing critical thinking. They’re designing for it. They want users dependent on the chatbot for advice, for decisionmaking, for thinking itself because dependency is a business model. In fact, it translates to $20 a month for chat GPT. But all of this has a societal cost and we are paying for it.

Teacher 6: I don’t get to teach. I spend my day managing behaviors and teaching students how to regulate their emotions. I’m not a counselor. I’m not a behavior specialist. I’m a teacher. And most of my job is managing behaviors. I just watched a video of a teacher getting pepper sprayed by their student in the school because they took their phone because it was being used to cheat on a test.

Narrator: She didn’t sign up for this. None of them did. Teachers go into the profession with the expectation that they will teach similar to how their teachers taught them. They didn’t realize that they would be managing behaviors because they’re not behavioral therapists. But today, that’s what the job entails. Severe breakouts, tremors, daily anxiety attacks, crying before work, crying after work, dreading the drive in, bringing work home because there’s not enough time to do your job at your job.

The data shows teacher shortages were being reported on back in 1998. But back then, it was fewer than 30% of states. Fast forward to today, and it’s 86% of school districts that can’t fill their positions. 86% is a collapse, not a shortage. 411,000 teaching positions are either empty or filled by someone who isn’t fully qualified.

As a result of having less staff and more students, more students with behavioral issues, teachers are burning out. In fact, teachers have the highest burnout rates of all industries with 44% reporting always or very often feeling burned out. This clip says: “How it feels going to sleep tonight knowing that I don’t have to wake up tomorrow and teach children because I quit teaching in the middle of the year.”

We can go to the comments:

“What are you doing instead???? (Asking for me).”

“Currently in class and just letting them talk over me because I’m tired of it already.”

“What do you do now? I want out of education”

“Quitting teaching was the BEST decision of my life…you won’t regret it!!”

“This is honestly terrifying seeing how many teachers wanting to quit. Teachers deserve better than this.”

Narrator: The comments are filled with teachers who want out or teachers who have already left and it’s the best decision they made.

By the way, this video was posted one week ago. It has over 2 million views and over 292,000 likes. The algorithm found every burnt out teacher in America.

“I live like this. so that my students can live like this. So, how can I afford to do this on a teacher’s salary? The answer is I can’t. I’m living paycheck to paycheck. I am beyond broke.”

Narrator:These are the people that we’re losing. Teachers who are willing to live paycheck to paycheck to nurture the next generation.

A survey found nearly 97% of teachers use their own money to buy classroom supplies. Teachers earning between $35,000 to $50,000 are spending $700 out of pocket each school year for kids to have pencils.

Critical thinking is becoming a class marker. Who can actually question things? But this is to be expected. For years, education has been systematically devalued, defunded, and deprioritized.

But who truly benefits from a population that can’t read, can’t write, can’t think critically and ask questions? These same tech companies creating these problems are selling the solution. The same government that claims prosperity is defunding schools while at the same time using our tax dollars to build yet another AI data center.

Male Speaker: What every educator on this app is talking about and what every educator in the field is noticing is a dramatic decline in basic critical reasoning skills and basic literacy skills among students. This is particularly pronounced among high school age students where they’re engaging with more complex material and can’t grasp basic concepts or manage basic memory about those concepts. And what this is creating is a generation entering the workforce without basic comprehension skills that is going to make it very hard for them to keep and maintain any form of employment.

On the inverse of this, we’re seeing kids in more affluent families being not only pulled out of the public school system and sent to things like monastery schools, but being pulled away from technology, not given access to anything more than say a TV or a video game station until they’re a teenager. No tablets, no phones, things like that. And what they’re doing to fill their time instead is the normal childhood stuff of playing outside, reading a book, coloring coloring sheets. All of these things that seem like play, but are actually building soft skills that make someone much better able to navigate the world around them as they get older. The gap is not going to be who can use AI and who cannot. The gap is not going to be who is an allstar on the ACT with a full ride and who is not. The gap is going to be who can reason in a basic way and who cannot. And those that cannot will probably be left behind.