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Niall Ferguson: AI’s Great Brain Robbery
ChatGPT and its like have swept through academia, changing how students work, write and think. The bots are here to stay, so we need to reimagine learning.
“Do you yet understand we’re living in a sci-fi novel”? That was the question posted on X last month by Mike Solana, a protégé of Peter Thiel. “Seems that way,” replied Elon Musk. He should know. Thirty years ago, you might have scoffed at a sci-fi book set in 2025 about a multibillionaire whose companies operate a vast fleet of self-driving electric cars, a social media network, a chain of satellites beaming the internet to terminals all over the world, and a private rocket programme bigger than Nasa’s; who is also developing brain implants and robots; and who ultimately intends to colonise Mars — all with the assistance of an artificial intelligence chatbot.
The only person who might have envisioned a future as outlandish as our present is the Seattle-based author Neal Stephenson. Near the beginning of Stephenson’s 1995 novel The Diamond Age, there is an exchange between a computer engineer named Hackworth and an “equity lord” — a tech billionaire, as we would say — named Finkle-McGraw. The engineer alludes to some research work he has been doing.
“What sort of work?”
“Oh, PI stuff mostly,” Hackworth said. Supposedly Finkle-McGraw still kept up with things and would recognise the abbreviation for pseudo-intelligence, and perhaps even appreciate that Hackworth had made this assumption.
Finkle-McGraw brightened a bit. “You know, when I was a lad they called it AI. Artificial intelligence.”
Hackworth allowed himself a tight, narrow, and brief smile. “Well, there’s something to be said for cheekiness, I suppose.”
I think a lot about PI these days, not least because of the catastrophic effect it is having on actual intelligence. The Diamond Age, like so many of Stephenson’s novels, offers us a troubling glimpse of a future we have already reached. Software has eaten the world. Venture capitalists and engineers reign supreme. But his networked society has reverted to tribalism. The most powerful of the phyles (ethnic tribes) are the Anglo-Saxon “Neo Victorians” who have reverted to the social strictures of the mid 19th century. There is a slum-dwelling underclass of tribeless thetes. But one little girl finds her way out of the Shanghai gutter when she is given a stolen copy of a highly sophisticated interactive book, The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, which a modern reader will recognise as a large language model (LLM) or a chatbot. Immersive, interactive, and adaptive, it gives Nell the education she would otherwise never have received.
Dreamt up by Stephenson 30 years ago, such a primer now exists in multiple, competing forms and is available to anyone with an internet connection. Small wonder that Sam Altman, the founder of OpenAI — whose ChatGPT launched the AI Age just two and a half years ago — says we are on the brink of a new Renaissance. “Do you think you’re smarter than [the GPT o3 model] right now?” Altman asked the Financial Times rhetorically in a recent interview. “I don’t … and I feel completely unbothered, and I bet you do too.”
Altman has every reason to want to soothe us: he needs our subscriptions. Yet it would be strange to be completely unbothered by the speed with which young people are adopting AI. As Altman himself has noted, “older people use ChatGPT like Google. People in their twenties and thirties use it as a life adviser.” And college students “use it like an operating system. They set it up in complex ways, connect it to files, and have detailed prompts memorised or saved to paste in and out.”
WWSG exclusive thought leader Sir Niall Ferguson is one of the world’s foremost historians of economics, international relations, and global power. His incisive analysis illuminates the geopolitical forces and economic undercurrents shaping the 21st century. From great power competition to emerging security challenges, Ferguson offers unparalleled historical context and strategic insight — helping global leaders, policymakers, and business executives anticipate what lies ahead. To invite Sir Niall Ferguson to your next event, contact WWSG.
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