Why PKL exists

PKL began with a book about the way social media platforms erode critical thinking. 100 pages in, I realized that what I was writing was obsolete. Social media platforms overload us with information and spur us to form beliefs emotionally rather than logically. But they don’t actually think for us. ChatGPT and other LLMs do.

I never found social media platforms compelling, but I was smitten with the LLMs. As someone who loved reading encyclopedias as a kid, LLMs were a godsend. You could pursue any curiosity in conversation with an intelligence that walked past the Turing Test. Within a few years, the question had changed from whether AI could imitate a human to whether models like Claude had a soul.

At the same time, LLMs are training us to think less as we outsource more to them. Many of us use and manage them well because we’ve already learned the skills we’re outsourcing: writing and critical thinking. The same won’t be true for the LLM native generation. How will they manage an LLM’s output if they haven’t spent thousands of hours writing and thinking? Will LLMs become the oracle they trust without questioning? Will they even have the right questions?

Maybe there’s an alternate future to the one we’re building. One where we use AI to create an offramp from a future of idiocracy. To use AI to help us think better — to read widely, imitate deliberately, and understand through practice. That’s what PKL is for.

And yes, I’m taking back the em dash.