Consider the Luddite

Unnati Bose (MBA ‘26) on learning, distraction, and the quiet art of thinking for ourselves.

Amusing Ourselves To Death. Prescient writer Neil Postman wrote this book in 1985 about what the advent of television technology would do to American culture. In the book, he asks, “what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”

The truth is, I haven’t read the book. I looked up quotes from this book because its title arrested me. I haven’t even verified if Postman really says that. I don’t need to. Or do I?

It’s almost November. I am walking over from Aldrich to Two Bow Street. This class has occurred every Wednesday this semester. I know the route by memory, but I’m always pulling up Google Maps. Sometimes to warrant against a wrong turn, sometimes to check my ETA, sometimes to see if it’s going to rain on the way back. Sometimes because I’m just so accustomed to looking at my phone on a minute-by-minute frequency. I read somewhere that regular use of Google Maps shrinks your hippocampus because your brain evolves to become lazy when you have no use for spatial memory.

The first week of the RC year, the classroom is gripping. My screen time is the lowest it has ever been. I spend nearly two hours preparing each case, highlighting it in bright colors: yellow for relevant facts, green for positives, orange for concerns, and pink for plot shifts. I fill the marginalia with my summaries (in my words) and prepare my responses to the assignment questions in a separate notebook. I show up to my 8 a.m. discussion group ready to discuss and learn from my brilliant peers. We are so engrossed that our group never covers all the cases for the day. We are nervous, even fidgety. Our insecurity is bleeding into our sincerity. We are sharing an experience.

By the end of the RC year, the classroom is so disengaged that we don’t even share the same inside jokes anymore. We text each other constantly during class, and the group chat spams with hundreds of messages (the prodigies even craft memes in the class). Some don’t even read the case, and most of us have double-sided print-outs of ChatGPT summaries. The vibes have shifted. The participation remains high (because the “H” in HBS stands for “Highly Insecure Overachievers”), but the stupidity has skyrocketed. The atrocity of the questions in BGIE (“which is better for Pakistan: democracy or dictatorship? You can only pick one!”) is matched with the ludicrousness of the responses (“a little bit of corruption is needed for growth”). I saw my Very Smart Friend ask ChatGPT what caused populism in France as the professor mouthed the question. Perhaps they hadn’t read the case, or perhaps they had and wanted to elevate their answers. In both cases, they certainly didn’t want to think through the question of what led to the rise of conservative populism in the land of the French Revolution.

In an interview my tiny hippocampus cannot recall, Ezra Klein makes the case against intellectual shortcuts. He emphasizes the danger of pretending to know something we don’t. I call this (because going to HBS gives me the arrogance to place my analysis in the same paragraph as this celebrated writer) the three-takeaways — or the Sparknotes — problem. We all do this — claiming authority when discussing an idea when we have only read the summary or a podcast about it. I have done this, frankly, because I can get away with it. It’s not that asking ChatGPT to summarize a repetitive and uninspiring 15-page case is wrong. It’s certainly not immoral or causing direct harm to someone else. It’s just not the point of education. Klein would say that reading the summary of a case is simply not the same as reading fifteen pages about it, even when they are making the same argument across five of them. The point is to engage with those ideas for five pages. The point is to wrestle with the events and protagonists, complete with the context they experienced, and juxtapose ourselves in the case. How does ChatGPT know what resonated for you in the case? It only knows what the world has already thought about it, but it doesn’t know what you will think about it. 

Klein says, “I used to conceptualize knowledge incorrectly. [...] I thought that what you were doing was downloading information into your brain, and now I think that what you are doing is spending time, grappling with the information, making connections that will only happen through that process of grappling. [...] What knowledge is supposed to do is change you, and it changes you because you make connections to it.”

To be clear, I think AI has immense potential and is already breaking important ground. I am personally excited to see how we can leverage it to improve access to healthcare in under-resourced settings (i.e. the world). I also take the threat of AGI seriously and spend a lot of time thinking — and catastrophizing — over what it means for all of us in pivotal stages of our careers to go into an economy so fraught with precarity.

But if AI will outperform me on every task I can do, then all I have left is to be. To think for myself. To “think longer,” as ChatGPT would say. To believe in my specialness, my individuality, and my creativity for its own sake in the face of remarkable AI slop. To stop amusing myself endlessly with reels and start looking out into the distance and appreciating the majestic Baker Library and magnificent fall in Allston. To read, underline, and fill the marginalia with my meaning. To hold hands with a friend. To have a party. As Postman says, “no medium is excessively dangerous if its users understand what its dangers are.”

I am walking back from my Wednesday class. I have just boarded the Anderson Memorial bridge. It is raining, and the wind is gustful, so I tuck my phone inside my pockets and whimsically resolve to look out into the distance. I see a bird taking flight. She is fledgling and takes a while to fully come to a height. When she does, she decides to fly against the wind.

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

By Elizabeth Alexander

Poetry, I tell my students,

is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves

(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”),

digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,

emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find

in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God

in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.

Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,

and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)

is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

Unnati Bose (MBA ’26) is originally from India but has called many places home. She graduated from Shri Ram College of Commerce with a degree in Economics. She has worked in social impact consulting, global health, and pharma. In her free time, she can be found asking questions of love, community, and popular culture on her substack, Uno’s Thought Scramble.