AI will be used in place of any actual personal thought process as we've known it

What will become of the current generation of kids ?

°Should we embrace artificial intelligence or fear the outcome ¿

No fear and do not embrace it. The kids are dumb already when you look at the way they are taught and test scores so AI cannot make it any worse. Do kids still have to do IQ tests?

The "kids today are doomed" argument is one of the oldest and most repetitive complaints in human history.

Every generation seems to develop an extraordinary confidence that it was the last one capable of independent thought, hard work, resilience, proper communication, or common sense. Yet somehow civilisation continues to function and evolve despite these dire predictions.

The same criticisms were levelled at those who grew up with books, newspapers, radio, television, calculators, personal computers and the internet. Each innovation was supposedly going to create a generation incapable of thinking for themselves. Instead, society adapted and expectations changed.

What's particularly amusing is that many of the people lamenting that "young people don't think anymore" are themselves relying on sat-navs instead of maps, smartphones instead of memory, search engines instead of libraries, and calculators instead of mental arithmetic. They happily outsource vast amounts of cognition every day, yet become alarmed when the next generation adopts the latest tool.

AI will undoubtedly make some people intellectually lazy. So did Google. So did calculators. So did Cliff Notes. The difference is that those who fail to understand the underlying subject eventually get exposed. AI can generate an answer; it cannot sit an exam, defend an argument under scrutiny, perform surgery, troubleshoot a failed system, or demonstrate genuine expertise when challenged.

The real danger isn't AI. It's the arrogance of assuming that intelligence is measured by how closely younger generations resemble our own.

If anything, today's children may need to think more critically than previous generations. They must learn not only facts, but also how to evaluate sources, detect misinformation, identify AI-generated nonsense, and separate confidence from competence.

The future belongs neither to those who reject AI nor to those who blindly trust it. It belongs to those who understand how to use it while retaining the ability to think independently.

As for being the "last generation of thinkers?"

My own experience suggests quite the opposite. My son's knowledge base is vastly broader than mine was at the same age. He has access to information, educational resources and learning opportunities that simply didn't exist when I was growing up. By the time I had managed to locate a book, encyclopedia or knowledgeable adult, he can access multiple sources, explanations, lectures and viewpoints within seconds.

What some mistake for a lack of intelligence is often just a difference in how knowledge is acquired and processed. Young people today may memorise fewer isolated facts because information is instantly available, but they are often exposed to a far wider range of subjects, ideas and perspectives than previous generations ever were.

The challenge for them is not access to knowledge; it is learning how to filter, verify and apply it. Frankly, that is a far more sophisticated problem than the one many of us faced.

Every generation likes to imagine it was the last to possess genuine wisdom. More often, it is simply the last generation to mistake familiarity for superiority.... And every generation that has ever existed has said something remarkably similar.

Every one of them has been wrong.

22 minutes ago, GreasyFingers said:

No fear and do not embrace it. The kids are dumb already when you look at the way they are taught and test scores so AI cannot make it any worse. Do kids still have to do IQ tests?

Sit the 11+ test - Have a go at....

• The Maths Paper

• The English Paper

• Verbal Reasoning Papers

• Non Verbal Reasoning Papers

• GL Assessment Papers

https://examberrypapers.co.uk/resources/free-11-plus-practice-papers/

These tests consist of dozens of rapid-fire questions across Maths, English, Verbal Reasoning and Non-Verbal Reasoning, often allowing little more than 30 seconds per question on average.

This is what many 10-year-olds are capable of when competing for places at secondary school.

Yet some people seem happy to observe a handful of children spending thirty minutes of their day behaving exactly as children always have and conclude that an entire generation has somehow become incapable of thought.

Try sitting one of those papers yourself. Fifty or so questions, under time pressure, across multiple disciplines, knowing that every second counts - then realise that half the 10 year olds taking these tests would kick your a$$es with comical embarrassment.

You may come away with a rather different impression of the next generation - as you are focusing only on those you may see using an iPad at dinner.

1 hour ago, PhilipHabib said:

AI will be used in place of any actual personal thought process as we've known it

What will become of the current generation of kids ?

°Should we embrace artificial intelligence or fear the outcome ¿

DO most people use AI here on this forum as if it is Google search?

Incredible amount of knowledge can be learned with AI if you treat it as a partner and work through problems or topics. It's going to make mistakes but working through the mistakes is where most the benefits come from. It's first response is basically whatever has been repeated the most on the internet. Asking it follow-up questions is where a person can learn more than that has ever been possible pre AI.

7 minutes ago, atpeace said:

DO most people use AI here on this forum as if it is Google search?

Incredible amount of knowledge can be learned with AI if you treat it as a partner and work through problems or topics. It's going to make mistakes but working through the mistakes is where most the benefits come from. It's first response is basically whatever has been repeated the most on the internet. Asking it follow-up questions is where a person can learn more than that has ever been possible pre AI.

Ai is great if you asked targeted questions

Boomers were the last generation of thinkers.

AI will not change this much.....

I think.

11 hours ago, richard_smith237 said:

Try sitting one of those papers yourself. Fifty or so questions, under time pressure, across multiple disciplines, knowing that every second counts

That is what we did with IQ tests.

12 hours ago, PhilipHabib said:

AI will be used in place of any actual personal thought process as we've known it

What will become of the current generation of kids ?

°Should we embrace artificial intelligence or fear the outcome ¿

Why do you think people stop thinking because of AI?

First, I have to compliment you on a great question. It is interesting to see how some think human nature will stop because of AI. I do not think people who already think for themselves, question the big things in life, and stay curious by nature will stop thinking. But those who prefer shortcuts over thinking will probably use AI as another shortcut.

The real consequence is not that humans stop thinking overnight. The real danger is total control by very few, where true sources become harder to find, or only available through filters. That would be catastrophic.

Those who now base their opinions on headlines only are part of a real problem. Quality news is often behind paywalls, and we can see how that influences people’s opinions, especially on social media, where the discussion often goes on what people think the article is about, not what the article actually refers to. They jump on the train and hit the buttons. Before, back in the day, newspapers were available everywhere, also for those who did not have much money. Now real access is more limited to those who pay or know where to look.

AI will not change human nature. Religion, fantasy stories, school, culture, government, laws and rules have already shaped people for centuries to follow guidelines more than think freely. We are all formed one way or another, but very few know it or will admit it. Most are trained to fit the box, not question it.

13 hours ago, richard_smith237 said:

The "kids today are doomed" argument is one of the oldest and most repetitive complaints in human history.

Every generation seems to develop an extraordinary confidence that it was the last one capable of independent thought, hard work, resilience, proper communication, or common sense. Yet somehow civilisation continues to function and evolve despite these dire predictions.

100%

3 hours ago, GreasyFingers said:

That is what we did with IQ tests.

If you sat it at around 10 or 11 years old in the UK, the purpose was fairly simple. It helped determine whether you might be suited to a grammar school or a standard comprehensive.

Education, particularly when freely available, has always been one of society's great levellers. Back then I was too busy d!cking about to have benefited from being sat alongside the brightest pupils. Equally, there was a reason comprehensive schools streamed pupils into different sets and that matter (to me at least a few years later). Teaching everyone at the pace of the slowest benefits nobody and slowed the rest of the class.

Today there are far more ways to assess aptitude and cognitive ability. Employers commonly use tests such as the Wonderlic [https://wonderlictestpractice.com/] often alongside maths, English, verbal and non-verbal reasoning assessments. They are not perfect, but they do provide a reasonable measure of how quickly people can process information, recognise patterns and solve problems.

I sometimes wonder how some of today's self-proclaimed "greatest generation of thinkers" would perform if presented with one of these tests. Not on social media. Not with Google, YouTube and a bunch if memes behind them. Just a timed assessment of reasoning and problem-solving.

What interests me, however, is not the tests themselves, but the ongoing debate around who considers themselves a "free thinker" - or in this case "the last generation of thinkers".

There seems to be a growing tendency for some people to define "thinking" simply as rejecting mainstream views. If experts agree on something, the experts must be compromised. If a position is widely accepted, then it becomes suspect by virtue of being widely accepted. Consensus itself is treated as evidence of error.

The paradox is that many of these self-appointed (free) thinkers will accuse others of being incapable of independent thought, while simultaneously dismissing any conclusion that aligns with evidence, scientific consensus, peer review or established expertise.

In their view, arriving at a conclusion supported by decades of research cannot be "thinking" because it happens to agree with the mainstream position. Yet arriving at the opposite conclusion, often on far less evidence, is automatically self labelled as independent thought.

That strikes me as an odd definition of "greatest thinkers". What I see instead particularly amongst some on this fora is growing intellectual reverse-snobbery, where informed opinion and careful reasoning are dismissed as establishment thinking (and usually TLDR response), while ignorance wrapped in confidence is mistaken for insight. Lengthy discussion is replaced by slogans, evidence by and abundance of memes lifted from facebook (which the younger generation no longer use), or fringe websites, and critical thought by emotionally satisfying one-liners designed to trigger applause rather than reflection.

Surely the question is not whether a conclusion is mainstream or fringe. The question is whether the reasoning and real science behind it once intelligently and critically removed from profit or politics stands up to scrutiny - thats the only facet that truly matters.

There is often an element of Dunning-Kruger involved here; enough knowledge to feel informed, but not always enough to appreciate the complexity of the subject. Cognitive dissonance then takes over. Once a belief becomes tied to a person's identity, challenges are no longer evaluated on their merits. Instead, disagreement becomes proof that others are brainwashed, while criticism becomes evidence that uncomfortable truths are being exposed.

The genuinely independent "great thinkers" I have encountered tend to be rather different. They are willing to change their minds, comfortable with uncertainty and capable of questioning their own assumptions - I see this is where the latest generation are starting to excel - the importance on questioning their own and pre-established assumptions and drawing a factually sound conclusion.

Ironically, that last point is where the paradox becomes most obvious.

Many of the people who accuse the mainstream of being unable to think independently will read this and immediately apply it to everyone except themselves. They will argue that those who trust evidence, scientific methodology and peer review are incapable of questioning their assumptions.

In doing so, they often demonstrate the very behaviour they are criticising.

The belief that they are among the few capable of independent thought becomes evidence that they are independent thinkers. Any challenge to that belief merely reinforces it.

Different tribes, different slogans, different authorities perhaps, but often the same human tendency towards confirmation bias, group identity and certainty.

To my mind, genuine free thinking is not measured by how often you disagree with the mainstream. It is measured by your willingness to follow the evidence wherever it leads, including when it leads somewhere you did not expect, or perhaps did not want, to go.

That, for me, is where the real irony lies - this is where 'The last Generation of (self appointed) thinkers' fall flat on their face - they are unfamiliar with that with which they are unfamiliar and just see a kid with an iPad in a restaurant, or a back-packer with elephant pants and start making sweeping generalisations because they believe they were / are better without any genuine comparison.

That child taking a break on an iPad in a restaurant, bored rigid by his parents' conversation, or that backpacker wandering around in elephant trousers, may well be part of the next generation of great thinkers. They may go on to develop new technologies, advance medical treatments, discover a breakthrough cancer therapy, perfect an electronic nose, invent a new propulsion system, or solve the energy storage problems that continue to frustrate engineers today.

Or perhaps they will achieve none of those things and spend their lives drifting through it.

The point is that we simply do not know - and thats something we do know.

Suggesting "we (or whoever) might be the last generations of great thinkers" - is fundamentally flawed on that level - certainly not the thought of a 'great thinker'...

Edited June 16Jun 16 by richard_smith237

16 hours ago, PhilipHabib said:

AI will be used in place of any actual personal thought process as we've known it

What will become of the current generation of kids ?

°Should we embrace artificial intelligence or fear the outcome ¿

AI is based on what human already thinks, it's just a rapid search engine that can put the result together in plain language to save you from reading hundreds of pages. So, there will be also thinkers in the future, otherwise AI loose its mind...

AI is clearly a double-edged sword. The kids are using it in classrooms and at university to do the work but are worried that it will lessen their opportunities for employment... this is true, as entry-level jobs and positions are what AI is being tried out on now and will be the first to go. Unfortunately, that means employers will drop the number of positions/jobs that new graduates want to get on the career ladder and will intensify competition. Some people even predict that what you will end up with is lower level blue-collar workers being managed by an AI system in say, for example, a warehouse/depot and the AI will act as middle management... you will still have humans at the top and bottom but the middle may get hollowed out significantly.

I was reading a news article that in China they have seen the writing on the wall and their university system has culled hundreds of courses from university offerings and added a load of tech centered ones for the future... so things like humanities, liberal arts, and all the meaningless fluff is headed for the door. Young people should be being encouraged to do AI proof degrees, and not ones that won't matter soon like marketing/advertising/accounting/history/software coder... even stuff like law to some degree too. Young people (certainly in the West) should learn a trade skill and get rich from being a engineer, plumber, builder, electrician, or study something like entrepreneurship and start businesses because they will be AI proof for a long while yet.

17 hours ago, PhilipHabib said:

AI will be used in place of any actual personal thought process as we've known it

What will become of the current generation of kids ?

°Should we embrace artificial intelligence or fear the outcome ¿

AI has its place and unfortunately lazy people use it extensively. I think the general spread of AI use comes from people leaving school illiterate and extremely lazy. It would appear that schools in Europe and more focused on brain washing that actual teaching.

I have found it incredibly useful. It has helped me fit French doors in my house, answering endless questions and analysing photos to guide me through the process. It helped me create a detailed and comprehensive planning application for a charity I volunteer for. It also helped me make some money by assisting someone with a business rates revaluation.

On a more personal level, it helped me transcribe my late father's handwritten wartime diaries into a readable format, more than forty years after he died and left them forgotten in the loft. In a way, it brought him back to life.

It has helped me sort out my household finances and savings, allowing me to get on top of things far more easily and with much less hassle than before.

As a festival-goer, it has improved photographs I take at UK festivals where I attend with a reviewer friend. I use a small Panasonic Lumix camera and AI can often enhance the images to make them look as though I was standing right in front of the stage.

It also lets me indulge my love of counterfactual history and "what if?" scenarios. For example, what might have happened if Hitler had not been antisemitic? How different would Germany's history have been?

And that's only a small sample of what I've used it for so far. It can even transform almost anything into the style of Philip Larkin's poetry—my favourite poet.

Finally, my wife and I visited Santorini last week and took some wonderful photographs. She wasn't prepared to join the long queue for the iconic sunset viewpoint in Oia, so I took a picture nearby and used AI to place her in the classic shot instead.

For me, the real value of AI isn't any single spectacular use case—it's the hundreds of small and large ways it helps solve problems, learn new skills, preserve memories and make life a little easier.

And before anyone asks, this is all my own experience and my own words. The only thing AI has done here is tidy up the spelling, grammar and typos so that other people can read it more easily.

The New Companion

It started with the small things.

A doorway needing fitting,
measurements scribbled on envelopes,
the usual Saturday uncertainty
of screws, spirit levels,
and whether the frame would ever sit square.

Questions once carried
to neighbours or library books
now vanished into a glowing screen
that answered before the kettle boiled.

Then other matters followed.

The charity's paperwork,
those careful pages nobody notices
unless they go wrong;
figures, maps, objections,
all assembled into order.

A little money earned.
Bills explained.
Savings sorted into columns
that no longer seemed
to conceal some private threat.

And then, unexpectedly,

my father came back.

Not in any grand sense,
not walking through the door,
not the impossible gift.

Only his handwriting,
fading across wartime pages
left for forty years in the loft,
becoming words again,
sentences,
a voice.

Outside, the years continued.

Festival fields.
Plastic glasses.
Distant stages.
A small camera held above the crowd,
later discovering details
it never really saw.

History, too,
opened its locked rooms.

What if this had happened?
What if it hadn't?
The old fascination
of roads untaken,
of nations turning left
instead of right.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Santorini,
my wife declined a queue
that wound towards sunset,
and later appeared
exactly where the guidebooks said she should,
the photograph quietly improving reality.

None of it miraculous.

No machines rising.
No future arriving.

Only a succession
of modest rescues:
a problem solved,
a memory recovered,
a task shortened,
a little confusion removed.

The kind of help
that slips unnoticed into life
until one evening you realise

how many small burdens
are no longer being carried alone.

Edited June 16Jun 16 by beautifulthailand99

5 hours ago, richard_smith237 said:

If you sat it at around 10 or 11 years old in the UK, the purpose was fairly simple. It helped determine whether you might be suited to a grammar school or a standard comprehensive.

Education, particularly when freely available, has always been one of society's great levellers. Back then I was too busy d!cking about to have benefited from being sat alongside the brightest pupils. Equally, there was a reason comprehensive schools streamed pupils into different sets and that matter (to me at least a few years later). Teaching everyone at the pace of the slowest benefits nobody and slowed the rest of the class.

Today there are far more ways to assess aptitude and cognitive ability. Employers commonly use tests such as the Wonderlic [https://wonderlictestpractice.com/] often alongside maths, English, verbal and non-verbal reasoning assessments. They are not perfect, but they do provide a reasonable measure of how quickly people can process information, recognise patterns and solve problems.

I sometimes wonder how some of today's self-proclaimed "greatest generation of thinkers" would perform if presented with one of these tests. Not on social media. Not with Google, YouTube and a bunch if memes behind them. Just a timed assessment of reasoning and problem-solving.

What interests me, however, is not the tests themselves, but the ongoing debate around who considers themselves a "free thinker" - or in this case "the last generation of thinkers".

There seems to be a growing tendency for some people to define "thinking" simply as rejecting mainstream views. If experts agree on something, the experts must be compromised. If a position is widely accepted, then it becomes suspect by virtue of being widely accepted. Consensus itself is treated as evidence of error.

The paradox is that many of these self-appointed (free) thinkers will accuse others of being incapable of independent thought, while simultaneously dismissing any conclusion that aligns with evidence, scientific consensus, peer review or established expertise.

In their view, arriving at a conclusion supported by decades of research cannot be "thinking" because it happens to agree with the mainstream position. Yet arriving at the opposite conclusion, often on far less evidence, is automatically self labelled as independent thought.

That strikes me as an odd definition of "greatest thinkers". What I see instead particularly amongst some on this fora is growing intellectual reverse-snobbery, where informed opinion and careful reasoning are dismissed as establishment thinking (and usually TLDR response), while ignorance wrapped in confidence is mistaken for insight. Lengthy discussion is replaced by slogans, evidence by and abundance of memes lifted from facebook (which the younger generation no longer use), or fringe websites, and critical thought by emotionally satisfying one-liners designed to trigger applause rather than reflection.

Surely the question is not whether a conclusion is mainstream or fringe. The question is whether the reasoning and real science behind it once intelligently and critically removed from profit or politics stands up to scrutiny - thats the only facet that truly matters.

There is often an element of Dunning-Kruger involved here; enough knowledge to feel informed, but not always enough to appreciate the complexity of the subject. Cognitive dissonance then takes over. Once a belief becomes tied to a person's identity, challenges are no longer evaluated on their merits. Instead, disagreement becomes proof that others are brainwashed, while criticism becomes evidence that uncomfortable truths are being exposed.

The genuinely independent "great thinkers" I have encountered tend to be rather different. They are willing to change their minds, comfortable with uncertainty and capable of questioning their own assumptions - I see this is where the latest generation are starting to excel - the importance on questioning their own and pre-established assumptions and drawing a factually sound conclusion.

Ironically, that last point is where the paradox becomes most obvious.

Many of the people who accuse the mainstream of being unable to think independently will read this and immediately apply it to everyone except themselves. They will argue that those who trust evidence, scientific methodology and peer review are incapable of questioning their assumptions.

In doing so, they often demonstrate the very behaviour they are criticising.

The belief that they are among the few capable of independent thought becomes evidence that they are independent thinkers. Any challenge to that belief merely reinforces it.

Different tribes, different slogans, different authorities perhaps, but often the same human tendency towards confirmation bias, group identity and certainty.

To my mind, genuine free thinking is not measured by how often you disagree with the mainstream. It is measured by your willingness to follow the evidence wherever it leads, including when it leads somewhere you did not expect, or perhaps did not want, to go.

That, for me, is where the real irony lies - this is where 'The last Generation of (self appointed) thinkers' fall flat on their face - they are unfamiliar with that with which they are unfamiliar and just see a kid with an iPad in a restaurant, or a back-packer with elephant pants and start making sweeping generalisations because they believe they were / are better without any genuine comparison.

That child taking a break on an iPad in a restaurant, bored rigid by his parents' conversation, or that backpacker wandering around in elephant trousers, may well be part of the next generation of great thinkers. They may go on to develop new technologies, advance medical treatments, discover a breakthrough cancer therapy, perfect an electronic nose, invent a new propulsion system, or solve the energy storage problems that continue to frustrate engineers today.

Or perhaps they will achieve none of those things and spend their lives drifting through it.

The point is that we simply do not know - and thats something we do know.

Suggesting "we (or whoever) might be the last generations of great thinkers" - is fundamentally flawed on that level - certainly not the thought of a 'great thinker'...

Was that reply AI generated?

6 minutes ago, GreasyFingers said:

Was that reply AI generated?

How dare you - "Was that AI generated?"

An exquisitely intriguing interrogative, and one that perhaps reflects the ongoing socio-linguistic evolution of contemporary digital discourse.

In years gone by, when an individual encountered an argument possessing an inconvenient degree of evidential robustness, rhetorical coherence, or merely more paragraphs than their attention span could comfortably accommodate, the customary response was to dismiss it as a "wall of text" or "word salad."

Today, however, we appear to inhabit a more algorithmically conscious communicative paradigm. The fashionable rejoinder is no longer "word salad" but the infinitely more zeitgeist-compatible: "Was that AI generated?"

The underlying functionality remains delightfully unchanged.

Rather than engaging with the substantive epistemological architecture, argumentative granularity, or evidential underpinnings of the text itself, one simply pivots toward speculative authorship attribution. The argument is neither refuted nor rebutted; it is merely subjected to a provenance audit.

In essence, what was once "I can't be bothered to address that" has undergone a process of technological rebranding and emerged as "Aha! A computer may have assisted."

A remarkable feat of conversational innovation, really.

The conclusion remains conspicuously invariant: when the response to an argument focuses exclusively on who—or what—wrote it, rather than the content itself, one begins to suspect the criticism may be compensating for a shortage of counterargument.

Or, to employ the modern vernacular: that's a lot of AI accusations for someone who hasn't actually addressed the point.

1 hour ago, richard_smith237 said:

The conclusion remains conspicuously invariant: when the response to an argument focuses exclusively on who—or what—wrote it, rather than the content itself, one begins to suspect the criticism may be compensating for a shortage of counterargument.

The first question you always ask on everything: why did he say that or why did he write that? Then you can understand who or why.

On 6/15/2026 at 7:40 PM, richard_smith237 said:

Sit the 11+ test - Have a go at....

• The Maths Paper

• The English Paper

• Verbal Reasoning Papers

• Non Verbal Reasoning Papers

• GL Assessment Papers

https://examberrypapers.co.uk/resources/free-11-plus-practice-papers/

These tests consist of dozens of rapid-fire questions across Maths, English, Verbal Reasoning and Non-Verbal Reasoning, often allowing little more than 30 seconds per question on average.

This is what many 10-year-olds are capable of when competing for places at secondary school.

Yet some people seem happy to observe a handful of children spending thirty minutes of their day behaving exactly as children always have and conclude that an entire generation has somehow become incapable of thought.

Try sitting one of those papers yourself. Fifty or so questions, under time pressure, across multiple disciplines, knowing that every second counts - then realise that half the 10 year olds taking these tests would kick your a$$es with comical embarrassment.

You may come away with a rather different impression of the next generation - as you are focusing only on those you may see using an iPad at dinner.

No issue with the earlier questions and would, I think, have been the same at age 11. However absolutely no idea on questions 21 to 25.

Please share what the hell they are about?

We certainly will be the last generation of tinkers. Nothing will be repairable the way things are going.

On 6/15/2026 at 8:24 PM, Rockyroad said:

Ai is great if you asked targeted questions

Yes.

But, please,

You must remember to only ask it what you either know or knew.

This way, you won't get fooled.