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Who Will Be the New Cognitive Elite?
Will AI make us better thinkers, or weaken our brains even more?
When I was in high school, my family moved from a big city to a smaller one with a sizeable Amish community. We didn’t have much contact with the local Amish people, but our family made friends with a lawyer who frequently represented Amish clients in real estate transactions. This friend surprised us one day by complaining that his clients used up all of his cell-plan minutes (it was the 1990s, when wireless plans still charged by the minute).
Wait, one of us asked, the Amish use cell phones? Absolutely, the lawyer said. Members of the local Amish community (different Amish groups have slightly different rules) couldn’t own a cell phone, but they sometimes needed to use one. So they borrowed his.
This revelation scrambled my understanding of the Amish. I had absorbed the simplistic, pop-culture view of their relationship with technology, believing that they rejected every tool invented after the Industrial Revolution. But it turns out that Amish people have a much more complex and intentional attitude toward new technologies.
How do Amish communities decide which technologies to welcome, which to reject, and which to occasionally borrow from kindly outsiders? According to the Elizabethtown College…
