Aaron Smith

NEW: US government now targeting opponents of AI and data centers, acknowledging that emerging AI technology may cause “large-scale protests that devolve into civil unrest” & is categorizing activism against AI as “anti-tech extremism.” -WIRED

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next. Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it. Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

⚡️Higher education is entering its liquidation phase as a mass middle-class belief system. The demographic cliff is only the visible trigger. The deeper break is that the entire college model was built on three assumptions: there would always be more students, families would always treat college as mandatory, and employers would always reward the credential enough to justify the cost. All three are now weakening at the same time. That is why this matters. A fertility decline from 2007 shows up in college admissions with an 18-year delay, but the enrollment shock lands inside a system already overbuilt. Colleges expanded staff, facilities, administrative layers, debt loads, athletic budgets, student-life amenities, DEI bureaucracies, marketing machines, and low-ROI programs during an era when the college-going population was bigger and the credential premium felt unquestioned. Now the customer base is shrinking while the product is being repriced. That creates a financial vise. The elite tier survives because it sells scarcity, network, status, marriage markets, recruiting access, and proximity to power. A Harvard or Stanford degree is not mainly a classroom product. It is a social-routing asset. Those schools can keep demand even if people lose faith in “college” broadly. The practical tier survives because it has obvious economic utility. Engineering, nursing, accounting, skilled health fields, hard technical programs, logistics, applied AI, defense-adjacent disciplines, and high-placement public universities can still justify themselves. Cheap public options also survive because affordability becomes a weapon. The exposed layer is the bloated middle: expensive private colleges without elite status, regional schools with weak draw, generic master’s programs, low-placement liberal arts degrees, weak online MBAs, tuition-dependent institutions, and universities that confuse branding with value. Those schools are going to face the hardest truth: students were not loyal to them. Students were loyal to the belief that the system required them. That belief is cracking. AI makes the break sharper because it attacks the bottom rung of the white-collar ladder. College made sense when the degree bought access to entry-level knowledge work. If entry-level knowledge work gets compressed by AI, the bridge weakens. Families will not pay unlimited tuition for a credential that leads into a shrinking first rung. They will ask harder questions: what job, what network, what income, what debt, what skill, what proof? The cultural layer is even bigger. College used to be the default coming-of-age institution for the American middle class. It replaced church, apprenticeship, local adulthood, early marriage, and family formation as the official bridge from youth into adult status. Now that bridge is expensive, delayed, ideologically contested, economically uncertain, and increasingly detached from real capability. So the enrollment cliff is really a legitimacy cliff. The schools will respond by discounting tuition, poaching students, merging departments, cutting humanities programs, chasing international enrollment, adding AI buzzwords, expanding career services, begging donors, leaning harder into athletics, and selling “community” because the economic case is weaker. Some will survive. Many will shrink. Some will close. The sector will consolidate because the old demand curve is not coming back. The brutal truth: higher education became a credential factory priced like a luxury good, staffed like a bureaucracy, and justified by an employment ladder AI is now destabilizing. Demography lit the fuse. AI removes the escape route. The next decade is going to separate institutions that actually create human capital from institutions that merely certify participation in a fading social ritual.