The Dual-Use Instrument: AI's Golden Age of Breakthroughs and the Erosion of Human Cognition

Sam Kriss wrote that in 1931, Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria trekked to the remote foothills of the Alai Mountains and discovered something profound: basic literacy didn't just teach people to read. Literacy rewired how they thought. Illiterate peasants grouped shapes by lived experience (a circle was the moon, a square a drinking bowl). A few years of Soviet schooling flipped the switch.  These same people grouped by abstract geometry and solved hypothetical syllogisms about white bears in the Far North. Literacy birthed a new mind, one capable of abstractions, counterfactuals, and the kind of imaginative leap that fuels revolutionary politics and scientific progress.

Fast-forward to 2026. We're living through the mirror image of Luria's observation, but in reverse. AI chatbots, transformer models, and large language models (LLMs) are delivering superhuman feats of synthesis, prediction, and creation. Yet they're quietly undoing the cognitive habits that literacy once instilled. The same tools that are saving doctors time and accelerating Nobel-worthy science are fostering what one researcher calls "cognitive surrender" - the outsourcing of reasoning itself.

An interesting case is this Substack post, about a general practitioner (GP) medical doctor and digital health leader. The author dove headfirst into ambient AI scribing for 18 months. The promise was intoxicating: walk into a 10-minute consultation, maintain eye contact, speak naturally, and emerge with a complete, structured note. Burnout dropped. Documentation time plummeted by ~26%. It felt like getting the consultation back.

Then the second-order effects hit. Consultations stretched because he stopped curating in real time—why steer when the machine records everything? Follow-up notes were accurate but ailien: comprehensive transcripts lacked his clinical voice, synthesis, or "illness scripts" (those experiential mental models GPs build through thousands of encounters). The act of writing the note had been doing invisible cognitive work, prioritizing, reflecting, & reasoning. Offloading those thought processes broke the feedback loop. The doctor stopped using the tool not because it failed, but because it succeeded too well, causing subtle, deleterious side-effects.

We're not returning to pre-literate sensory immediacy. We're entering something stranger: a world of infinite generated content where direct experience is mediated by AI, and where abstract, counterfactual thinking is disappearing.

The Golden Age: What AI Has Already Delivered

AI breakthroughs are breathtaking.

Transformer models and LLMs have supercharged science in ways that were science fiction five years ago. AlphaFold and its 2024 Nobel Prize-winning successors, including AlphaFold 3 solved the 50-year protein-folding problem, predicting structures for over 200 million proteins with near-experimental accuracy. It now models how proteins interact with DNA, RNA, small molecules, and ions, unlocking rational drug design at unprecedented speed. AI-powered pipelines are delivering drug candidates 75% faster than traditional methods. Autonomous AI agents like Kosmos are compressing six months of PhD-level research into a single 12-hour run.

In materials science, AI has screened millions of candidates to discover new battery chemistries, carbon-capture materials, and quantum-computing components. Weather models run with hyper-accurate long-range forecasts. Self-improving labs iterate experiments in real time, slashing waste and cost. The 2024 to Q1 2026 period alone saw AI contribute to breakthroughs in fusion plasma control, exoplanet classification, and even new mathematical insights.

Economically, the gains are compounding. Generative AI is projected to add 1.5% to U.S. GDP by 2035, rising to 3.7% by 2075 through productivity alone. Industries with high AI exposure saw 10% productivity jumps, 3.9% job growth, and 4.8% wage increases in 2024-2025. Documentation tools like the one Gooch used are slashing administrative drag across veterinary medicine, human medicine, law, and engineering. Code generation, creative ideation, and data synthesis are freeing humans for higher-order work.

Many of these concrete accomplishments are not hype cycles. They are measurable, peer-reviewed revolutions in capability.

The Regressions: Literacy, Rationality, and the Extended Mind

Just as writing once pulled minds into abstraction, AI is pulling them back toward “fake it til you make it” fluency without friction, answers without effort, and sensory immediacy without synthesis.

Literacy rates and deep reading have been sliding since 2014 and the back slide is accelerating with AI. Elite university students increasingly can't finish a novel or parse a complex sentence without AI. One Kansas study found English majors struggling with Dickens' Bleak House—treating a metaphorical Megalosaurus as a literal dinosaur in Victorian London. These students respond like Luria's illiterate peasants: tethered to immediate, concrete reality.

Cognitive science gives insight into the relationship between literacy and cognition. "Extended mind" theory shows that writing isn't just recording thoughts; writing completes these thoughts. Gooch's experience mirrors these findings: AI notes broke the loop that built clinical expertise. Broader studies show AI users exhibit "cognitive offloading," that in turn causes declines in working memory, analytic reasoning, and critical thinking. People accept faulty AI outputs 73% of the time in controlled experiments lending evidence to the deleterious effects of "cognitive surrender.” Attention, skepticism, and the scientific method itself erode when LLMs do the synthesizing.

Steven Pinker's Rationality (2021) warned that we aren't born rational; we build rationality through deliberate practice in logic, probability, Bayesian reasoning, and causal inference. AI short-circuits and prevents skill growth from practice. Why wrestle with a syllogism when the model answers instantly? Why cultivate skepticism when the output is fluent and confident? The Enlightenment ideals, including empiricism, skepticism, & evidence-based progress rely on the very cognitive muscles we're letting atrophy with AI.

Backsliding in Human Potential

This phenomenon is not only about doctors or students. It's about the quiet diminishment of what makes a life meaningful.

In the arts, AI generates poems, paintings, and music at superhuman volume. Why labor through the frustration of original creation when the machine delivers polish? Personal artistic potential, the struggle that forges voice and vision fades in our “Age of AI.”

Economically, wealth creation has always come from human ingenuity: spotting unseen opportunities, iterating through failure, building novel systems. When AI handles the ideation and execution, the incentive to cultivate deep expertise or entrepreneurial grit weakens.

Philosophically, the great explorations of ethics, metaphysics, epistemology demand solitary wrestling with ambiguity. AI offers instant summaries and counterarguments. The joy of building your own worldview erodes. We risk a generation fluent in AI outputs but starved of the internal scaffolding that once produced  Socrates, Newton, Kant, Einstein, da Vinci.

Politics itself may regress from reasoned debate over imagined futures to tribal sensory immediacy. Streamers repeat formulas rather than abstract justice.

A Realistic, Guardedly Optimistic Future

None of these cognitive declines and their effects on society are inevitable.

We stand at an inflection point with enlightenment, wisdom, and agency. The post-literate age does not inevitably mean cognitive collapse. The “Age of AI” can mean augmented humanity if we treat AI as a seductively dangerous instrument, not a prosthesis.

Imagine "AI literacy" curricula that teaches not just prompts, but deliberate cognitive preservation: handwritten notes alongside AI drafts, Socratic challenges to model outputs, mandatory "unplugged" reasoning drills. Doctors like Gooch can (and some do!) use AI for transcription while reclaiming note authorship as a sacred clinical craft. Scientists could let agents run rote experiments while humans focus on the counterfactual leaps AI can't yet replicate.

The same transformers accelerating AlphaFold could help restore rationality.  Personalized tutors that drill children in skepticism, Bayesian thinking, tools that flag our own cognitive biases in real time. Economic gains could fund equal universal infrastructure: clean air, clean water, sanitation, energy, roads, railways, & telecommunication, that could free more people wealth creation, and personal “pursuit of happiness,” including creative and philosophical pursuits.

In the end, the future will not be purely post-literate or pre-AI literacy. It will be hybrid: a new extended mind where AI handles the volume and humans reclaim the voice, the synthesis, the purpose. The kids raised by AI dolls won't inevitably lose abstraction; they will almost certainly evolve a meta-literacy we cannot yet imagine.

We know that society shapes thought. Now you and I get to shape this society. The instrument is in our hands. We must use it carefully to cut away drudgery while sharpening the blade of the human mind. The breakthroughs and progress are themselves accelerating.  

Will we finally deploy the O'Neil mass driver?

In 1937, Edwin Northrup wrote about an "electric gun" in his (terrible) novel "Zero to Eighty." The book contained diagrams and the author actually built some prototypes at Princeton to prove out the idea, demonstrating it works well. Gerard O'Neill scaled up the concept and proposed a mass driver, aka "coil gun" in 1974.  That same year, O'Neill's "Colonization of Space" paper came out in Physics Today.  Reading that article changed my life. I joined the L5 Society (our song). It seems Jeff Bezos is also one of "Gerry's kids," embracing O'Neill's vision of human space colonization.

Among the key elements in O'Neill's vision is the use of mass drivers to move materials in space and also as a form of propulsion.  Land solar-powered mass drivers on a small asteroid, and use some of the mass of the asteroid itself as reaction mass to push the rock through space and park it in an orbit you want.  Robots assemble a large mass driver on the moon, then send the lunar regolith to a Lagrange point between the Earth and Moon, where solar smelters turn the ore into aluminum to build space colonies (and oxygen to breathe).  As O'Neill said in his lecture tour (that I attended), "The calculations [proving viability] are simple freshman physics."

If you are a "space nerd" like me, you should really read the book or watch the 2023 documentary "The High Frontier." I attended the MIT independent activities period (IAP) where they built a mass driver. I was a founding member of the L5 Society.

The military developed a rail gun for ships and the system is operational, but it will be phased out in favor of other systems that are superior for the military's purposes.

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A new Space company, "Moonshot Space" just came out of stealth and will develop a terrestrial mass driver to move fuel and cargo to low earth orbit. The payloads must be able to survive extremely high acceleration and the scale-up to send over 100 Kg per launch will be interesting to watch.

Consciousness is an illusion

I saw this interesting pop science article about new advances in neuro-technology for paralyzed people that included some serendipitous discovery about measurements of unconscious thoughts.  I went down a rabbit hole looking up qualia, sentience, and consciousness.  So I chatted with some of the AI chatter-bots about my understanding and weakly-held, strong belief that consciousness is an illusion.

Here is a (long) response from one of them that concludes consciousness is real and exists, but it is different from how we currently understand what it means.  I still feel that if consciousness does exist, it is radically different from our misperception of what it really is.

Here is a different response (shorter) that agrees with me and includes better rebuttals against the counter-factuals and strong negative references I found to my hypothesis.

Rewiring Democracy by Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders (2015)

I usually enjoy Bruce Schneier's books because they are clear, well-structured, and full of practical insight. Rewiring Democracy is no exception. The authors argue that artificial intelligence is not a radical break from existing technologies but rather a natural extension of them. They make the case that AI, if applied carefully, can improve democratic processes instead of threatening them.

The book explains how large language models, chatbots, and other machine learning tools could expand public participation, make legislation more transparent, and help citizens understand policy. I found the authors' steady optimism and lack of alarmism refreshing. They stay grounded in facts and resist the sensationalism that often surrounds discussions of AI and politics.

However, the book is dense. The detailed descriptions of the "dance of legislation" and the mechanics of bureaucracy can be tedious for readers uninterested in political procedure. Still, those sections show how the authors think AI could fit into real-world governance rather than just theory.

Even when the topic veers into areas I find dull, the book remains valuable for showing how broad the applications of AI have become. It highlights both the potential and the practical challenges of integrating intelligent systems into democratic life. 4/5 Stars.

When everyone knows that everyone knows by Steven Pinker (2025)

Why do groups keep up stories everyone knows are false—where each person sees the truth but pretends not to? Why do we tolerate polite hypocrisy, subtle bribes, half-hidden threats, or strategic flirtation? As someone wired for blunt honesty, I've long been baffled by these layers of social theater that seem to breed confusion and harm.

Steven Pinker's new book takes this puzzle apart with his trademark clarity, drawing on research in evolution, linguistics, and game theory—from the prisoner's dilemma to "The Emperor's New Clothes." He argues that shared fictions and mutual pretense aren't just signs of human weakness; they are tools that keep social life running. Sometimes truth is too volatile, and a bit of collective make-believe prevents conflict or preserves dignity.

What's most compelling is how Pinker turns apparent irrationality into evidence of strategic intelligence. The very evasions that frustrate literal-minded people serve an adaptive purpose, softening the blunt edges of honesty in complex societies. In an age flooded with misinformation, the book offers a sharp framework for seeing when concealment unites and when it corrupts.

Nothing has changed how I think about communication this profoundly since Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow. This is Pinker at his best—precise, surprising, and deeply relevant. 5/5 stars.

Into the impossible: Think Like a Nobel Prize Winner by Brian Keating (2021)

I rarely make time for long-form podcasts, but I often watch Brian Keating's short YouTube videos. They condense physics and astronomy insights into compact, accessible commentary. Keating's strength lies in his engagement with unconventional thinkers—Avi Loeb, Eric Weinstein, Sabine Hossenfelder—and in his defense of rational inquiry: curiosity, the scientific method, collaboration, Humanist Enlightenment values, and ethical responsibility in research.

The book distills conversations with Nobel laureates into a framework for creative thought and scientific curiosity. Keating extends his interest in physics toward a broader philosophy of how discovery unfolds. Into the Impossible blends scientific reflection with the rhetoric of self-improvement, urging readers to test assumptions, question orthodoxy, and cultivate purposeful collaboration.

The result is engaging and coherent, though familiar. The book reiterates themes Keating has already articulated across his public work. For readers accustomed to his "snackable" videos, the content will feel like a polished synthesis rather than new terrain. Still, its clarity and intellectual warmth make the repetition worthwhile. 4/5 stars

Less toxic & more-effective nanoparticulate MRNA vaccines & therapeutics

Everyone has personal experience with the  'miracle" vaccines used from 2019 - 2021.  The MRNA delivery mechanism for those and other MRNA medications uses nanoparticles in which the MRNA is embedded.  These nanoparticles can cross the cell membrane about 7% of the time so relatively large doses are needed for delivery.  These nanoparticles are also highly toxic and cause severe side effects that are frequently as bad or worse than the ailment they are meant to prevent or treat.  The nanoparticles also suffer from long tissue persistence, exacerbating their toxicity.  Many MRNA  therapeutics could be unlocked if the persistence and toxicity could be limited.

This new research paper, that was published in Nature, explains experiments that show promise of an approach the authors discovered to mitigating nanoparticle persistence and therefore the toxicity issues.

Irreversible Damage by Abigail Shrier (2020)

This book is much better than I expected. The author is a journalist who does a very good job of presenting the science through the words and interviews with the thought leading scientists themselves.  I did not appreciate or enjoy some of the social commentary and politics, but she does present highly relevant and astute observations. 5/5 Stars.

Fission-powered rockets will fly!

Remember my rant about how 1950's technology is the cat's pajamas and still unsurpassed? We are finally starting serious steps to fly fission-powered rockets and I may live long enough to see magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters with a specific impulse of 10,000 seconds.

How Trust Works: The Science of How Relationships are built, broken, repaired by Peter H Kim (2023)

This book is terrible. The Science in it is shockingly bad.  The topics covered are about taking offense, unrelated to trust. I kept hoping it would get better and it just got worse.  1/5 Stars.

1950’s Tech still unsurpassed

I am burdened with cognitive biases. I have sensibilities, ethics, and judgements from an earlier era. I look at large-scale human pursuits, social justice ethics, and public policy through a lens and rubric that biases me for the goals of The Enlightenment  -- Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.

Interstellar Spacecraft

In the 1950s, we planned, designed, built, and eventually flew (in the 1970's) interstellar spaceships to advance our understanding of our solar system, mostly the outer planets. Over fifty fantastic years later Voyager-2  is still gathering and transmitting data back to us about the interstellar medium. Among the considerations, methods, and technologies that have advanced since the probes were sent out is our consideration of reliability:  The 1950s perception of redundancy is now considered too conservative; we are increasing risk of catastrophic failure by using reserve power to deliver more scientific data from more instruments as Voyager-2 races towards the 21 billion Km mark from the earth.  Let's hope the probe lives 50 more years!  

Could we design, build, and fly interstellar spacecraft today?  Now that private companies like SpaceX have returned civilization to medium and heavy space launch capabilities, the answer in 2024 is "yes."  But are governments or NASA or other publicly funded "science" endeavors interested?  That answer is "no."  We have other concerns, values, and priorities. In the 1950's we cared about discovering the outer planets and the interstellar medium.  We designed space probes and instruments to "science the sh*it out of" the unknown frontier.  Our tech now is focused inward and no longer looking towards the stars.

Weapons Tech 1955

Another interstellar rocket engine concept, the liquid salt water rocket was first developed in 1955 for the "big stick," or the Supersonic Low Altitude cruise Missile (SLAM).  The concept was to create a nuclear-rocket-powered, large hypersonic cruise missile loaded with 10 Hydrogen Bomb warheads. The missile would fly faster than mach 3 at an altitude of 50m, navigate to targets using look-down cameras and a stored map (no inertial guidance, GPS, or other navigation!) and deliver H-Bombs while out-flying interception missiles and radar.  We developed both a scale model and a working prototype of the rocket motor that exceeded their design specs. The full-scale system was tested and verified in 1964.  We discovered the missile could circle the earth for "months," and adjust its speed and rocket exhaust to destroy targets and kill people with sonic booms and nuclear fall-out, respectively.  The missile could continue rampaging after exhausting its supply of H-Bombs. 100 of these missiles were planned. If launched as a revenge "doomsday device," each of these missiles could fly for months, nuke 10 large cities and then poison the world with nuclear fall-out.  If launched as a first- or second-strike nuclear weapon the SLAM could avoid detection, penetrate enemy territory, destroy 10 targets, fly home, and be reused if needed.

Optimism

My point about the 1950s is that our accomplishments were not just the progress & inventions of that time, including:

• Fiber optic cable

• Video Recording

• Hovercraft

• Oral Contraceptives

• Credit Cards

• Solar Power

• Non-stick cooking pans

• Lasers

• Polio Vaccine

• Microchips

• Seat Belts

Most people were optimistic about applications of scientific method and "the future." We envisioned and worked towards rapid improvements in wealth creation, social justice, and understanding our universe.  We planned to control the weather and use nuclear weapons for peaceful purposes. What happened?

The Horse, the Wheel, and Language by David W Anthony

The beginning and end of this book are interesting and enjoyable, but the majority of the details in the middle are really boring, 2/5 Stars.  Read the book summary or wikipedia articles on these topics instead.

Moon Dust as an earth cooling Parasol?

(cumulative attenuation from a monodisperse cloud of particles with total mass Mcloud = 109 kg at

https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal.pclm.0000133

Some of my fellow Gerry's Kids have published a study of how we can cool down the earth with moon dust.  The idea is based on the High Frontier. Throw some construction robots and bulldozers at the moon; the bots set up and maintain solar collectors, mass drivers (magnetic rail guns) and dust factories.  Once deployed, the rail guns shoot 10^10 kg of very fine (100 nm) dust particles at L1  or into an orbit that lingers near L1. The dust reduces sunlight by 1.8%.  Cool the earth.  In the future, we will vacuum up the dust for space habitat construction.

Almost all of the geoengineering methods I have seen (Termination Shock is a fun book!) do not solve the critical problem of reaching zero CO2 emission and then going negative (sequestering CO2) to mitigate ocean acidification, and other deleterious effects of too much CO2.  Humans put almost 3.6% of all new CO2 into the atmosphere and when volcanism has some quiet times, our contribution can go up to almost 4%.

Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows

Thinking in Systems:

My friend Senthil asks for and shares book recommendations with me.  His 2022 list included this title so I added it to the (large) queue of "holds" at my local library. (Aside: Here is proof my library is better than yours.)  I had low expectations because the book was revised by others after Donella's untimely death and is now over 20 years old.  My fear of the sharp political slant was somewhat unfounded. The book really does make the reader sit back and think. The methods described can expand our horizons to overcome some instinctive cognitive biases.  We can use the simple approaches of the book to see many phenomena from a broader point of view. I enjoyed the book and recommend it. 4/5 Stars.

From Strength to Strength by Arthur C Brooks

Fantastic book with good scholarship, interesting anecdotes about famous musicians, good evidence-based science, and a very compelling take on Ikigai. 5/5 Stars.  Highly recommended. 

Intelligence & Personality

This fascinating preprint appeared today in psyarchiv (https://psyarxiv.com/ar6g3/).  Personally, I have always found personality intrinsically interesting and I am very grateful Psych research has emerged from its history of weak science; Psychology is leading many other areas in combating the reproducibility crisis in science.  For the impatient, this preprint's results are:

Results showed that openness (ρ = .20) and neuroticism (ρ = -.09) were the strongest Big Five correlates of intelligence and that openness correlated more with crystallized than fluid intelligence. At the facet-level, traits related to intellectual engagement and unconventionality were more strongly related to intelligence than other openness facets, and sociability and orderliness were negatively correlated with intelligence. Facets of gregariousness and excitement seeking had stronger negative correlations. . .

Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know about the Word

The information in this book is mostly covered in Peter Zeihan's The End of the World is Just the Beginning. But the numbers themselves are interesting and there are other interesting facts. 4/5 Stars.  Vaclav should keep the numbers updated online.

If you think you know what a proton is

 

Think again and read this interesting summary of recent research.  In particular, try to explain how what we currently perceive as a "proton" can sometimes be detected as a quark soup consisting of two charm quarks that weigh 1.3 times as much as the entire proton.  Forget conservation of mass.  Einstein might label it "spukhafte Gewichtsveränderung."

Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark

Max Shapiro (Tegmark) writes better for a popular science audience than Roger Penrose.  But having just read Cycles of Time, I am wondering how Tegmark's very odd theory at the end accounts for the second law of Thermodynamics.  The end of Tegmark's book is slightly off-topic & very depressing but the entire book is very well-written, worthwhile, and approachable by a lay audience (like me) 4/5 Stars.

Brain Rules for Aging Well by John Medina

Great! 5/5 stars!