The fretting has swelled from a murmur to a clamor, all variations on the same foreboding theme: " Your Brain on ChatGPT." " AI Is Making You Dumber." " AI Is Killing Critical Thinking." Once, the fear was of a runaway intelligence that would wipe us out, maybe while turning the planet into a paper-clip factory. Now that chatbots are going the way of Google-moving from the miraculous to the taken-for-granted-the anxiety has shifted, too, from apocalypse to atrophy.
There's an old Latin phrase that has stayed with me lately: Succisa virescit. The translation roughly means, "When cut down, we grow back stronger." Originally the sixth-century motto of the Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino, it reflects a simple but profound truth about the human condition-growth often begins in the aftermath of loss. What was once a call to spiritual and physical resilience has become, for me, a powerful metaphor for cognition itself,