Laziness

Since ChatGPT appeared the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies on learning has been widely debated. Are they handy tools or gateways to academic dishonesty?

Most importantly, there has been concern that using AI will lead to a widespread “dumbing down,” or decline in the ability to think critically. If students use AI tools too early, the argument goes, they may not develop basic skills for critical thinking and problem-solving.

Is that really the case? According to a recent study by scientists from MIT, it appears so. Using ChatGPT to help write essays, the researchers say, can lead to “cognitive debt” and a “likely decrease in learning skills.”

The MIT team asked 54 adults to write a series of three essays using either AI (ChatGPT), a search engine, or their own brains (“brain-only” group). Analysis showed that the cognitive engagement of those who used AI was significantly lower than the other two groups. This group also had a harder time recalling quotes from their essays and felt a lower sense of ownership over them.

The authors claim this demonstrates how prolonged use of AI led to participants accumulating “cognitive debt.” When they finally had the opportunity to use their brains, they were unable to replicate the engagement or perform as well as the other two groups.

To understand the current situation with AI, we can look back to what happened when calculators first became available.

When calculators arrived in the 1970s, educators raised the difficulty of exams. This ensured that students continued to engage deeply with the material. In contrast, with the use of AI, educators often maintain the same standards as before AI became widely accessible. As a result, students risk offloading critical thinking to AI, leading to “metacognitive laziness.”

Possible Preaching Angle: Just as students should use AI as a tool to enhance—not replace—their thinking, so the Bible calls believers to seek wisdom actively without shortcuts.

In 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially recognized "internet gaming disorder" (IGD). Addicts play pathologically. They can't stop—they play even after their mental health and careers have suffered great harm. The WHO estimates that at least 60 million people worldwide suffer this condition. Fortnite, a combat, survival and violent online video game is the most played of all time, boasting over 500 million registered users.

Today, games are less expensive, more accessible, and more technically advanced than ever before. Psychology professor Jeffrey Derevensky, who advised the WHO panel, said, "Kids are walking around with a mini-console in their pockets. Gaming is a hidden addiction. You can't smell it on their breath and you can't see it in their eyes. And so parents are often totally unaware of what their children are doing."

Maclean's magazine writer and former addict Luc Rinaldi describes how playing, and especially winning, can meet basic needs:

I replayed Resident Evil 4 a dozen times because there's something endlessly satisfying about blowing up a zombie's head. But my favorite games were the ones that offered something my real life lacked. Exploring the fantasy world of Skyrim, I wasn't just some kid in the suburbs of Toronto; I was a noble swordsman on an epic quest to save the realm. In a video game, even a loner can feel like a king … The high was intoxicating.

The obsession runs deep. One North Carolina boy kept playing as a tornado was leveling his town. A study published in Nature showed that gaming can more than double a player's baseline dopamine levels. Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman claims that, for some players, “gaming can increase dopamine levels as much as having sex or snorting cocaine. Our brains are programmed to seek out more of these hits, which is what drives gamers to keep gaming.”

Like all addictions, there comes the inevitable crash. The trouble is that the euphoric feelings don't last. Gamers develop tolerances. They need to play more to achieve the same rush. After overloading their brains with happy signals, an equal and opposite reaction occurs. Their baseline dopamine level drops. They get angry, sad, and apathetic.

Kenyon Wilson, a professor at the University of Tennessee, wanted to test whether any of his students fully read the syllabus for his music seminar. Of the more than 70 students enrolled in the class, none apparently did. Wilson said he knows this because on the second page of the three-page syllabus he included the location and combination to a locker, inside of which was a $50 cash prize. But when the semester ended on December 8, students went home and the cash was unclaimed. Wilson wrote on Facebook “My semester-long experiment has come to an end. Today I retrieved the unclaimed treasure.”

Wilson said he wanted to include the hidden clues to brighten up the semester during the pandemic. “Teaching in a pandemic, I’m trying to do creative things and, you know, make it interesting. The syllabus is a really dry document, but I thought if my students are reading it, I might as well reward them.”

Tanner Swoyer, a senior studying instrumental music education, said that he felt “pretty dumb, pretty stupid” when he saw the professor’s post about the money in the locker.

Wilson said he was not disappointed with his students. When he was a student, he most likely would have also missed the clues, he said. “We read the parts that we deem important. You know, what’s the attendance policy? What are the things I need to do to pass this class? And then there’s other stuff. On the first day of the semester I pointed out: ‘Hey, there are some new things in the syllabus. Make sure you, you know, make sure you catch them,’ and then no one did.”

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Alertness; Bible reading; Scripture – Believers need to read the Word of God with careful attention because there are many hidden riches to be discovered; 2) Prayer; Promises of God – God has given us very great and precious promises in his Word which we can claim by faith through prayer (2 Pet. 1:4).

Do you realize that 30 percent of all men of working age in this culture are not working? There are many reasons for this. Some workers lack the skills needed for all but the lowest-paid jobs. Some jobs have been eliminated because of technology advances or cheaper overseas labor. Some have discovered government benefits that enable them to avoid working.

A study for the Mercatus Center of George Mason University, reports that “75 percent of inactive prime-age men are in a household that received some form of government transfer payment.” The researcher believes that government disability benefits in particular are one reason for the lack of interest in work.

Another trend toward irresponsibility is the growth of the video-gaming culture in our society. Many young men and women are spending countless hours every day or many hours of the night just gaming away. They may lose sleep, college opportunities, and work advancement with addictions to meaningless competitions that consume time and energy but produce nothing.

Possible Preaching Angle:

What would you call a pastime where a person spends all their time, all their money, all their resources, pursuing things that are not real and that never will benefit them or society? We would call it slavery. And those who are enslaved by such meaningless pursuits ultimately lose all respect for themselves. Work gives us dignity, because work itself is dignified.

Two school officials have been suspended after a firestorm of controversy involving a single email. Nicole Joseph and Hasina Mohyuddin are the associate dean and assistant dean, respectively, at the Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. The pair of staffers were required to “temporarily step back from their positions,” after they authored an all-campus email responding to the mass shooting at Michigan State University just days earlier. The email sparked outrage because some of the text was credited as having been written by ChatGPT, the popular AI writing tool.

It’s ironic that both deans worked in the college’s Office of Equity, Diversity & Inclusion, because most of the complaints stemmed from the fact that students didn’t feel the emails were particularly inclusive or equitable. On the contrary, student Bethanie Stauffer felt it was “disgusting.” She said, “There is a sick and twisted irony to making a computer write your message about community and togetherness because you can’t be bothered to reflect on it yourself.”

The next day, Joseph sent an apology email, but the damage had been done. Senior Laith Kayat said, “Deans, provosts, and the chancellor: Do more. Do anything. And lead us into a better future with genuine, human empathy, not a robot. [Administrators] only care about perception and their institutional politics of saving face.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

It is better to be authentic and make an effort to communicate, rather than using shortcuts. Leaders must demonstrate a commitment to serving and resist thoughtless communication.

Robert Samuel is a 46-year-old former mobile phone salesman who now gets paid to sit in line for others. If a client wants something but can’t stomach a long queue, they pay him thousands of dollars to do it for them. Samuel sits, standing, or sometimes sleeps, in lines: waiting for theater tickets, iPhone releases, limited edition hoodies, and more before either relinquishing his place to his customer or buying them tickets. This has been his work for nine years and before the pandemic, he was earning over $86,000 a year. The toughest gig was Hamilton where the inside of his tent frosted over.

He said, “You can get people to literally do everything for you. They can watch your kids, they can watch your pets. They can clean your home. They can pick you up from A to B, or bring you your food. So, this is just an extension of that. You can get people to do just about anything, within reason, as long as it’s legal and you want to pay.”

Dean Gunther is a tattoo artist currently residing in Manchester, England. And when a recent client came to him with a bold idea, he was so stoked about the idea that he did it for free.

The client was a friend who hates working out, but wanted to have the look of well-toned, “six-pack” abdominal muscles. So, he asked Gunther to tattoo the look onto his stomach. Gunther said, “I had seen really bad ones attempted before. Because I specialize in color realism, I wanted to give it a go.” Of course, it wasn’t only the technical challenge that got him on board. He also had an additional motivation. "I thought it would be funny."

Once they completed the two-day project, they took a video and shared it on TikTok to verify the rapidly spreading rumor of the six-pack-tat, which looks impressive from a distance. Gunther’s followers responded with a combination of disbelief and bemused congratulation. One user summed up the approach with a simple aphorism: “if you can’t tone it, tat it.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

We shouldn't be satisfied with only an appearance of goodness or righteousness. Without spiritual discipline and the holiness that results, it is nothing but empty posturing.

At some point in the stretch of days between the start of the pandemic’s third year and the feared launch of World War III, a new phrase entered the zeitgeist, a mysterious harbinger of an age to come: people are going “goblin mode.”

The term embraces the comforts of (laziness): spending the day in bed watching [the TV] on mute while scrolling endlessly through social media, pouring the end of a bag of chips in your mouth; downing Eggo waffles over the sink because you can’t be bothered to put them on a plate. Leaving the house in your pajamas and socks only to get a single Diet Coke from the bodega.

“Goblin mode” first appeared on Twitter as early as 2009, but according to Google Trends “goblin mode” started to rise in popularity in early February 2022. “Goblin mode is kind of the opposite of trying to better yourself,” says Juniper, who declined to share her last name. “I think that’s the kind of energy that we’re giving going into 2022 – everyone’s just kind of wild and insane right now.”

But as the pandemic wears on endlessly, and the chaos of current events worsens, people feel cheated by the system and have rejected such goals. On TikTok, #goblinmode is rising in popularity. “I love barely holding on to my sanity and making awful selfish choices and participating in unhealthy habits and coping mechanisms,” said another with 325,000 views.

Many people tweeting about goblin mode have characterized it as an almost spiritual-level embrace of our most debased tendencies. Call it a vibe shift or a logical progression into nihilism after years of pandemic induced disappointment, but goblin mode is here to stay. And why shouldn’t it? Who were we trying to impress, anyway?

Possible Preaching Angle:

The world seems to be unraveling as people give themselves over to apathy, selfishness, and hopelessness. Let’s remember “the hope we have” (1 Pet. 3:15) and “shine as lights in a dark world” (Phil. 2:15) and keep up self-discipline and godly behavior while we wait for the Lord’s return (Phil. 3:20).

When residents saw the Christmas tree unveiled in downtown Newport, Washington, some of them were less than impressed. Fritz Turner said, “It wasn’t really great. Kinda poorly decorated. It’s almost like they didn’t have the time for it this year. They were just kinda like ‘throw the lights up, get it done.’”

When Turner saw what he felt was such a pitiful display, he got an idea. “I wanted to make a joke of it really, so I made a GoFundMe.” On the listing, he promised to take the money to purchase and decorate a better-looking Christmas tree, but he also dropped in a few barbs. “Even Charlie Brown's Christmas tree looked better than this sad spruce. When they put these lights up, the value of our homes dropped.”

Clearly Turner was not the only one feeling that way, because the post collected more than $2,700 from over 60 donors in a matter of days. Additionally, there were people who donated directly to the city of Newport, earmarking their funds specifically for the Christmas tree.

All the commotion got the attention of Jason Totland, president of the Newport Chamber of Commerce. Totland quickly mobilized 30 or so volunteers to stage a tree-lighting ceremony, complete with hot chocolate, an appearance from Santa Claus, and giveaways for kids.

Turner said, “I’m really inspired by how quick the community gathered to put on this event. It’s really cool that something that started out as a joke became something so big, and I’m just inspired to do more work for the community.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Good natured humorous “snarking” can serve as an opportunity to call attention to something that needs correction and seek the good of the community. When done correctly, criticism can result in positive action.

Leonardo da Vinci is widely considered one of the most diversely talented individuals ever to have lived. As an artist, he is known for The Last Supper and The Mona Lisa among others. However, his total output in painting is really rather small. There are less than 17 surviving paintings that can be definitely attributed to him, and several of them are unfinished.

The small number of surviving paintings is due in part to his chronic procrastination. He often required a sharp threat by his patrons that they were about to withhold payment to motivate him. The Mona Lisa took over 15 years for him to finish. Worse was The Virgin of the Rocks, commissioned with a seven-month deadline. Da Vinci finished it 25 years later. Da Vinci apologized on his deathbed "to God and Man for leaving so much undone."

Possible Preaching Angle:

God calls his people to build his kingdom--to transform people in the name of Jesus. However, many of us procrastinate. Other “more important” things get in the way. There will come a day when we may look back upon our lives with regret for the things left unfinished.

Donelan Andrews was rewarded with $10,000 by his travel insurance company, all for doing something he teaches students to do every day: read carefully. Squaremouth intentionally added language in its policy documentation offering a reward for anyone who was still reading the details. Their intent was to promote the idea of reading the details carefully, because failure to understand the details of what their policies cover is the number one reason why travel insurance claims are denied.

Of course, a denied claim is only one example of the kind of loss lurking in the fine print. In the United Kingdom, Manchester-based firm Purple provided free Wi-Fi access in 2017 for over 22,000 people. Buried in their terms of service was a commitment to a thousand hours of community service, which could include “cleaning toilets and relieving sewer blockages.” In a story with The Guardian, representatives from Purple explained that they inserted the clause “to illustrate the lack of consumer awareness of what they are signing up to when they access free Wi-Fi.”

But even a thousand hours of service is a mere pittance compared to what Londoners gave up when they consented to the “Herod clause” of security firm F-Secure’s Wi-Fi experiment. That clause provided service only if “the recipient agreed to assign their firstborn child to us for the duration of eternity.”

Not to be outdone, British retailer GameStation once changed its license agreement to a pre-checked box. Unless users unchecked the box, they granted the company “a nontransferable option to claim, for now and forever more, your immortal soul."

Potential Preaching Angles: (1) God wants disciples who will willingly count the cost of discipleship, not be suckered into it because they weren't paying attention. (2) The details of Scripture matter to God. It is a matter of obedience or disobedience. Of course God cares about the details because he loves us, not because he’s trying to trick us.

Storyteller Megan McKenna captures this reluctance to claim and act on our desires in a wonderful parable:

There was a woman who wanted peace in the world and peace in her heart, but she was very frustrated. The world seemed to be falling apart. She would read papers and get depressed. One day she decided to go shopping, and she went into a mall and picked a store at random. She walked in and was surprised to see Jesus behind the counter. She knew it was Jesus, because he looked just like the pictures she’d seen on holy cards and devotional pictures. She looked again and again at him, and finally she got up her nerve and asked, “Excuse me, are you Jesus?” “I am.” “Do you work here?” “No,” Jesus said, “I own the store.” “Oh, what do you sell here?” “Oh, just about anything!” “Anything?” “Yeah, anything you want. What do you want?” She said, “I don’t know.” “Well,” Jesus said, “feel free, walk up and down the aisles, make a list, see what it is you want, and then come back and we’ll see what we can do for you.”

She did just that, walked up and down the aisles. There was peace on earth, no more war, no hunger or poverty, peace in families, no more drugs, harmony, clean air, careful use of resources. She wrote furiously. By the time she got back to the counter, she had a long list. Jesus took the list, skimmed through it, looked up at her and smiled. “No problem.” And then he bent down behind the counter and picked out all sorts of things, stood up, and laid out the packets. She asked, “What are these?” Jesus replied, “Seed packets. This is a catalog store.” She said, “You mean I don’t get the finished product?” “No, this is a place of dreams. You come and see what it looks like, and I give you the seeds. You plant the seeds. You go home and nurture them and help them grow and someone else reaps the benefits.” “Oh,” she said. And she left the store without buying anything.

Celebrity chef, writer, and TV personality Anthony Bourdain, who wore a tattoo on his arm that read in ancient Greek, "I am certain of nothing," committed suicide on June 8, 2018, at the age of 61. In an interview for Men's Journal from 2014, Bourdain was asked: What are the benefits of hedonism, and what are the risks?

Bourdain replied, "Look, I understand that inside me there is a greedy, gluttonous, lazy, hippie—you know? I understand that. … there's a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, and smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons, and old movies. I could easily do that. My whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid, and outwit, that guy. … I'm aware of my appetites, and I don't let them take charge."

When asked: How should a man handle regret? And what's your biggest regret?

Bourdain replied, "Regret is something you've got to just live with, you can't drink it away. You can't run away from it. You can't trick yourself out of it. You've just got to own it. I've disappointed and hurt people in my life, and that's just something I'm going to have to live with. … You eat that guilt and you live with it. And you own it. You own it for life."

Law professor and technology expert Tim Lu claims that there's an underestimated force that drives our daily lives—convenience. We want nearly everything about our lives to be convenient, efficient, and easy. Wu calls convenience "the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies." He writes:

As Evan Williams, a co-founder of Twitter, recently put it, "Convenience decides everything." Convenience seems to make our decisions for us, trumping what we like to imagine are our true preferences. (I prefer to brew my coffee, but Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I "prefer.") Easy is better, easiest is best.

Of course there are benefits to some of life's conveniences, but he also warns that there can be a dark side. Wu argues:

With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us … When we let convenience decide everything, we surrender too much.

Possible Preaching Angles: Discipleship; Disciples—Jesus did not offer convenience in following him. He warned us to count the cost and at times to do what is inconvenient in order to follow him.

A Japanese business called "Family Romance" has actors for hire, ready and willing to be anything from your baby to your grandparent. "In an increasingly isolated and entitled society, the CEO [Ishii Yuichi] predicts the exponential growth of his business and others like it, as à la carte human interaction becomes the new norm," wrote Roc Morin in The Atlantic.

There doesn't seem to be any ask too big for Yuichi's company. He's played a dad to children who don't know he's been hired. He's been a groom in faux weddings that the attendees didn't know were staged. His company even provided a baby for a pregnant woman—who hadn't yet delivered—who was desperate to have her dying dad meet his "grandchild."

And as outlandish as the idea might sound now, it's ultimately believable that this trend could one day come to America: if Yuichi is right, the desire to rent loved ones comes from a longing for control combined with a vast laziness—two sentiments alive and well in our current culture. Describing why women choose to hire him as a boyfriend, Yuichi says:

The women typically say that in a real relationship … it takes years to create a strong connection. For them, it's a lot of hassle and disappointment. … It's just easier to schedule two hours per week to interact with an ideal boyfriend. There's no conflict, no jealousy, no bad habits. Everything is perfect.

The Telegraph, a British newspaper reported that a flock of over 1,300 sheep "had to be rounded up by police in the Spanish city of Huesca after their shepherd fell asleep." The article continued:

According to city authorities, the police were alerted to the presence of the extremely large flock attempting to negotiate the streets in the center of Huesca at around 4.30am on Tuesday when a local resident dialed Spain's 112 emergency number.

The dozing shepherd was meant to be keeping the animals in check outside the environs of the city while he waited for the clock to strike 7am, when he was due to guide the sheep northwards through Huesca towards Pyrenean uplands where his flock will graze during the hot summer months.

The police eventually found the herder, who was still peacefully slumbering. Together the embarrassed shepherd and police officers were eventually able to extract the sheep from the city and return them to their pastures.

Bible scholar N.T. Wright uses the analogy of waking up in the morning for how some people come to Christ through a dramatic, instant conversion and others come to Christ through a gradual conversion:

Waking up offers one of the most basic pictures of what can happen when God takes a hand in someone's life. There are classic alarm-clock stories, Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, blinded by a sudden light, stunned and speechless, discovered that the God he had worshipped had revealed himself in the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth. John Wesley found his heart becoming strangely warm and he never looked back. They and a few others are the famous ones, but there are millions more.

And there are many stories, thought they don't hit the headlines in the same way, of the half-awake and half-asleep variety. Some people take months, years, maybe even decades, during which they aren't sure whether they're on the outside of Christian faith looking in, or on the inside looking around to see if it's real.

As with ordinary waking up, there are many people who are somewhere in between. But the point is that there's such a thing as being asleep, and there's such a thing as being awake. And it's important to tell the difference, and to be sure you're awake by the time you have to be up and ready for action, whatever that action may be.

In the ongoing battle against oversleeping, humanity has devised some clever alarm clocks. But for all their clever designs, most alarm clocks still suffer from a common drawback: the fact that they're not designed for multiple users. When one person's alarm goes off, other people in the room or throughout the house have to wake up too. Most alarm clocks have no way to selectively wake up one person and leave the other person undisturbed. Until now, that is.

Wake is a new breed of alarm that targets individual users and wakes up one sleeper without rousing others. Here's how it works. After it's mounted to the wall above the bed, the device uses an infrared temperature sensor and special body-tracking software to discern where each person is lying (without a camera). When it's time to wake one person up, Wake silently takes aim, rotates into position, and then directs a tight burst of light and sound at their face.

To keep from rousing other sleepers, the device uses a set of parametric speakers capable of focusing sound into a narrow beam. Think of it as a spotlight for noise. If Wake is pointed straight at your head you'll hear it loud and clear, but if you're outside of the beam's small radius, the sound will be extremely faint.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) God calls you to wake up and live the Christian life, don't sleep through it; (2) The voice of God is personal and heard only by each individual, like Paul on the road to Damascus, to young Samuel in his sleep.

In the mid-'70s, an unknown editor named Gary Dahl was talking with his friends, who were complaining about all the work involved in caring for pets—feeding them, walking them, cleaning up after them. Dahl kidded that he had a pet that never caused him any trouble—a pet rock.

Surprisingly, the joke started to take off. Dahl recruited two colleagues as investors, visited a building-supply store and bought a load of smooth Mexican beach stones at about a penny apiece. The Pet Rock hit the marketplace in time for Christmas 1975. In a matter of months, some 1.5 million rocks were sold. It was a craze to rival the Hula-Hoop. For a mere three dollars and 95 cents, a consumer could buy … a rock—a plain, ordinary, egg-shaped rock of the kind one could dig up in almost any backyard.

For a few frenzied months in 1975, more than a million consumers did, becoming the proud—if slightly abashed—owners of Pet Rocks, the fad that Newsweek later called "one of the most ridiculously successful marketing schemes ever." When Dahl died in March 2015, his New York Times obituary claimed "the concept of a 'pet' that required no actual work and no real commitment resonated with the self-indulgent '70s, and before long a cultural phenomenon was born."

Pet Rocks made Dahl a millionaire practically overnight, but despite the boon Pet Rocks brought him he came to regret his success. The Pet Rock craze went the way of all fads—it died out and was replaced by the next fad. After his sudden wealth, he went through three marriages, a law suit, and failed attempts to match his previous success. At one point he said, "Sometimes I look back and wonder if my life wouldn't have been simpler if I hadn't done it."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Success; Ambition; Achievement; Emptiness—all of the success in the world can't satisfy our heart's need for Jesus Christ. (2) Conformity; Worldliness—It's amazing how a silly fad—a Pet Rock—can take off and become a worldwide craze.

The busyness of life has propelled many of us to get more rest. It's often a case of survival in the midst of unrelenting pressure. Research studies have been showing how essential sleep is to our mental and physical health. Now a new study on sleep says this: Wake Up! This latest study suggests that an overly long night's sleep could be just as bad for you as not getting enough sleep.

The study concludes, "… adults who usually sleep for less than six hours or more than eight, are at risk of dying earlier than those sleep for between six and eight hours." So, the magic number from these studies is 7 hours of sleep.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Maybe Hamlet had it right all along when he said, "Aye, there's the rub. For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come."