Really good piece. I don't have direct experience in Academia, but I can see similar incentives and outputs in everyday life.

I see it in people who will put highway traffic at risk of accidents so they don't miss the turn the GPS pointed out, having not bothered to do the work of learning fundamental navigational skills - or gladly outsourcing them to the machine and leaving them to decay.

I see it in people who giddily challenge the expertise of others because the machine gave them the support needed to reinforce pre-conceived opinions. What is now ChatGPT used to be TikTok, used to be Podcasters, used to be Instagram, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, TV talk shows, supermarket tabloids.

I see it in a cadre of leadership who blindly seize upon the latest Gartner reports to justify every single decision they "made", and feel they owe nobody an explanation because of their title or place in the hierarchy.

I see it in my own damn landlord, blindly following what a machine told them to charge for rent this year until I actually walk them through the financials involved and negotiate a more reasonable rate. How they charge for parking in a facility that's over half-empty, then wonder why residents never have visitors or why fire lanes are always blocked with parked cars overnight.

Hell, it's visible in the financialization of every fucking thing because the machines said we should charge $$$ for X and only pay our workers $ and how come people aren't buying shit anymore?

The narrative for the past hundred years has been that the machines should be trusted to do the right thing. That if you were replaced by a machine, it's because you made bad choices in life. GPS will never fail you, Google has all the answers, the "real" media is on socials, chatbots are smarter than scientists, and the stock market is the absolute best indicator of economic health.

And humans have behaved accordingly, because the incentives - or lack of disincentives - foster those outcomes. There's no need to learn basic orienteering when the GPS gets you there; there's no need to learn to search effectively when a chatbot or search engine spews out an answer 9 times out of 10; there's no need to understand your industry or organization when there's a consultant report right there, replete with recommendations for solutions to that problem you didn't know you had.

We have built an entire society that all but deters and punishes critical/Nth-order thinking. There's no incentive to learn new skills when machines dispense a "good enough" answer with a dopamine hit, and it's plainly visible in the slop of selfishness displayed by people out there. We can't very well close Pandora's Box or get rid of the machines, so we must instead figure out how to incentivize deep, critical thinking across the populace again.