Our Tower of Babel Era Is Here, and Many of Us Are Becoming Idiots

AI tools will make it far, far worse.

When I was in South Africa a few weeks ago, I kept on thinking of the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible. Not because I was having any sort of religious experience. But rather, because I have observed, which traveling the past few years, that the world in coalescing into a monoculture. People in South Africa looked and dressed the same as people in Savannah, Georgia. Girls were walking around in neutrals and trench coats, just like all of the American influencers on Instagram. The mall in Johannesburg had the same corporate chains — Zara, H&M, Mac, Coach — as the Palisade Mall in New Jersey, where I took my kids this past Christmas. Trends like 1990s Gwyneth Paltrow silk skirts and linen pants were everywhere.

When I started traveling in my late teens, I remember going to a new place, and immediately not wanting to wear any of the clothes I had packed. Because in a foreign country, I wasn’t on trend. The food was also completely different. As recently as a decade ago, I traveled with protein bars in my suitcase for the occasions when the only option was food I didn’t feel comfortable eating — for example, unfamiliar spices, or meats with gristle or goat or birds or even insects.

But now, everything is same when I travel, or at least feels the same to me. The brands and styles I’m sold on Instagram 4,000 to 10,000 times a day on my smartphone are the same brands being sold in Johannesburg, and in Iceland, and Turks and Caicos. Even the airport snack stands have the same types of chips, and chocolate bars, and beverages.

The world has adopted a monoculture. Despite our differences, we’re building a Tower of Babel made of consumer goods. In the Bible, the people of Shinar said:

“Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

And the Lord, that petulant little jealous man, said:

“If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

When I was young, I thought the next part was unfair:

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

Nine year old little Catholic me was like, let everyone live in harmony! Jesus Christ! Sounds like bliss! But I look at the monoculture I’m witnessing in the world, pumped to all of us constantly through our smartphones, little machines of propaganda and consumerism, and I see why God destroyed it. A monoculture might mean a certain ease, but it also means the death of so much else. The death of our brains, mostly. I’ll explain.

This is a theory that I began to test in conversations I had with people in South Africa. The first person was the tour guide leading us around a housing estate for wealthy people in Johannesburg. The house estate was behind electric fences, and was heavily fortified. It was landscaped with walking paths, but seemed mostly abandoned. We were talking about climate change. “I do get a little bit worried about one superpower getting control over the weather,” she said.

And I wanted to say, “Tell me more, sounds like a conspiracy theory I could latch onto.” I was thinking of China’s supposed ability to modify the weather to create clear skies for major events. But instead, I just said, “Hmm, yeah, that would be bad,” because like almost every human on earth, I’m an addict of my idiot machine (aka smartphone), and intellectual conversation, I’ve noticed, is getting harder and harder for me.

The second person I talked about with my Tower of Babel theory was a 25-year-old British journalist I was traveling with. On the trip, she actually read an entire novel. And not a dumb one. A feminist novel from the 1970s. “I didn’t think Gen Z actually read anymore,” I kept on gushing to her. “You’re amazing!”

“Hmm, I don’t know if I agree with you,” she said when I pointed out that everyone at Saint, an upscale Italian dinner in a corporate skyscraper district in Johannesburg, was dressed like a cast member from The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. And oh my god, the men. The white men in Johannesburg also had those stupid (but also, admittedly, sexy) mustaches, and the tattoos, and the short-sleeve button down shirts, just like the men on Summer House on Bravo.

Then she talked about how in different areas in the United Kingdom, there are different make-up trends. I don’t notice if people are wearing make-up unless their faces look like the bottom of clay pots, so I didn’t follow.

I didn’t ever get to the bottom of my question, which was, “Why is a monoculture bad?” Like take the Sky Daddy out of it; why did we, as humans, preserve the lesson of the Tower of Babel for 2,000 years, and teach it to children generation after generation after generation? Why did we say to the inheritors of the earth, “Be careful when you all become too similar.” Like, who cares if every menu in a trendy restaurant int the entire fucking world, from Africa to Alabama, has a beet salad and a creative burrata dish on it? Who cares if both white bachelorettes in Charleston and black African professionals in Johannesburg are dressing like yuppies from the 1988 J.Crew catalogue? What is the danger?

I think that there are some answers in MIT’s recent study on ChatGPT. It’s not a great study. But it mirrors something I very much observed while teaching the past year. I observed rapid changes in the study body as they adopted AI tools. One thing I noticed was that their creative thinking skills began to falter. The study mirrors these observations. It says that AI tools don’t just make user lazier - they actually reduce the neural pathways you use in your brain. In layman’s terms, they destroy your intellect.

I feel like Cassandra saying this (Cassandra from the Aeneid, philistine), but I think that in the coming years, we’ll come to realize that intelligence needs to be maintained throughout a lifetime using active methods like reading, writing, conversation, gossip, hand stuff, sports, failure. It’s not innate. It’s not something you get in childhood during your schooling years, and then can rely on for the rest of your life. You’re not like born with an IQ, and then can just bed rot and do your job using Claude, and maintain that IQ for the rest of your life.

Screens have made us dumber. Television made us dumber to begin with. It’s built for entertainment. It makes us passive consumers. We don’t learn a lot from it. It actually reduces cognitive functioning. ChatGPT, and AI tools, are going to strip people of what intelligence they have left. It doesn’t really matter how intelligence you might have been to begin with. People are not going to realize it until it’s too late. Cassandra over here warning — if you start relying on AI, you’re going to get dumber. And not a little bit dumber. Like, seriously, you might become a moron.

There’s so much talk right now about AI taking over the work of human intellect. These arguments seem ridiculous to me, because if you closely read what AI spits out (which most people don’t because, again, we’ve been spending the last few decades getting dumber on screens), it’s garbage. It’s so anodyne. It’s so fucking boring. Not to mention that the AI has nothing new to train itself on. Human beings are rapidly slowly down on creating their own art. So it will just get even more similar in the coming years. More monoculture. More Tower of Babel.

Which brings me to the fable of the Tower of Babel. God didn’t tear it apart because a monoculture makes us stronger. The monoculture is bad because it’s a reflection of a drop in intellect. When you have no friction or difference, and you don’t seek it out, it’s not because you like an easy life. It’s because you’re not very smart.

I’ll tell you. With my kids. I’m keeping them away from screens. I took their iPads away two years ago. They are not allowed to watch YouTube. Ever. It is blocked on every device I own. They will not us any AI tools in my house. My mom was super strict about television growing up. The only television we were allowed to watch was ABC’s TGIF and PBS programming on Sunday nights while we gave her foot massages. I thought she was a monster because she was so strict. I complained about her constantly. When I was in college, I watched television for 12 hours a day in revolt. But she set the foundations of learning early. I was bored all of the time, and because I was bored, I read, and made weird sex plays with my Barbies, and played outside with the neighbors, and built things in the forest. I learned. And I have that foundation to know how to learn now, even when it’s easy not to.

It’s hard to cling on to that. But Cassandra over here — we have to try. As much as you can, resist the idiot tools. Resist outsourcing your brain to something made by a man who thinks Kant was a genius and didn’t get around to reading The Fountainhead until he was in his forties. To resist what is to come, we have to stay sharp. And to stay sharp, we have to continue to learn.