Phil W. Bayles

A Short Story About The Scariest Sentence I’ve Ever Read

I was recently reading an article about AI and came across a phrase that has since latched onto my brain like a tick and refused to let go.

If you don’t know, ‘cognitive debt’ is the price that people pay for using ChatGPT and other such tools so much in their daily lives. A study at MIT has shown that relying on chatbots to help with tasks can lead to poorer memory and reduced brain engagement. Let the machine do the thinking for you, in other words, and you might just lose the ability to think altogether.

I found the phrase so utterly nightmarish and dystopian that I wrote a piece of flash fiction about it, and the good folks at 50-Word Stories published it. You can read it here.

(The name of the drug was inspired by Daniel Keyes’ brilliant novel Flowers for Algernon, one of the few books that ever made me openly weep.)