My wife and I spend a very significant amount of time learning about artificial intelligence (AI). We have read countless articles, try to catch every interview or podcast from leading thinkers on the topic, and spend a lot of time discussing it with family and friends. We are equal parts fascinated and genuinely scared about the potential impacts that it could have on us as individuals, on our business and on society as a whole.
It’s common to hear that AI will bring about a golden age of productivity, innovation, economic growth and prosperity. It is also quite common to hear that it could create massive disruption in the employment market and even potentially be a risk to the survival of humanity. That’s quite a wide range of potential outcomes!
It’s easy to feel anxiety with such disparate projections — and everything seems to be moving forward so quickly. It feels as if the discussion quickly went from “We need to slow down and understand the impacts of this technology to society,” to “We need to move faster than ever to make sure that American AI beats out Chinese AI.” We are increasingly hearing the question asked: “Do you prefer to have the world and your life run on Chinese AI or American AI?”
Most of what is coming feels out of our control … as if the train has left the station and we just need to hang on for what promises to be a very wild, unpredictable ride. That being said, there are in fact many things that we as individuals CAN control, and the team at MND is committed to doing our small part on what we can to be a part of potential solutions.
We strongly believe that it is more important than ever to make wanting to stay smart a top priority. What do I mean by that? The algorithms of the big tech companies increasingly are developing products that make us dumber. Take social media for example — it’s way too easy to be intellectually lazy on platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. The algorithms of these companies just keep feeding us what we want to see and hear, with the primary objective being to keep us engaged on the platform for as long as possible. Social media is great for a laugh, to make us smile or to watch a cool video of something, but I don’t think many of us feel like we walk away from a long bout of social media use feeling smarter. Entertained, yes. Enlightened, very rarely.
We believe that AI is very quickly ushering in an era in which it is becoming even easier to be lazy and ultimately become … yes, dumber. AI can be great to get us a quick answer to a question, but at what point are we outsourcing too much of our brain to the brains of companies like X, Meta and TikTok? And shouldn’t that question concern all of us?
Social media companies have increasingly invested in a range of AI applications, from user-facing chatbots to behind-the-scenes machine learning. (Jay Openiano/Unsplash)So how do we fight this cognitive laziness? How do we exercise our minds when AI increasingly can do so much of the heavy lifting? The most powerful tool we have is one of the oldest: reading. Not just skimming headlines or accepting AI-generated summaries, but engaging deeply with text. Reading builds the mental muscles AI can’t replicate: critical thinking, contextual understanding, and the ability to form a nuanced worldview. It’s how we move from simply knowing a fact to truly understanding an issue.
I believe that the answer lies in part to consciously, deliberately making wanting to stay smart something we value. The team at MND obviously already believes in the importance of reading and staying well-informed. But we also have recently launched several new products for those that take the risks of AI to our brains seriously:
1. MND Quiz: We now have a weekly news quiz that quickly and easily tests you on the past week’s top stories. It’s one thing to scroll through a news headline on social media in seconds, it’s entirely different to honestly assess our depth of reading, understanding, and retention of the content. MND Quiz provides a quick, fun way to do that.
2. MND Tutor: Countless studies have shown that learning another language is great for our brain. Sure, AI can increasingly translate everything in real time for us — but is that really the world we want to live in? When I first learned Spanish, I found that reading news articles was a highly effective way to accelerate my progress. Why? The articles are timely, relevant, and as a result provide great real life examples of content that can be easily practiced with Spanish speakers. For those reasons, our team has created a weekly MND Tutor in which we select an article and create a Spanish language lesson, complete with test questions to measure your learning retention. Best of all, we have beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels of each lesson so you can find the right tutor for your current level. Duolingo is great, but I am certain that you will find MND Tutor to be a Spanish language accelerator!
MND’s new AI-powered search bar can answer a wide variety of questions and provide articles on the query topic. (Screenshot)3. MND AI Search: This is an application of AI that we think can really accelerate your learning about Mexico. Over the past 11 years, our team has written over 25,000 articles of content. That is a massive amount of information on just about anything you would like to know about Mexico. That being said, our previous on site search bar, like that of many websites, wasn’t very good at going back and reviewing our archives of content to get you exactly the information you wanted. We are excited to announce that we very recently incorporated Perplexity AI into MND’s search bar. What does this mean for you? It means you can ask the MND search bar on our site literally anything you want to know about Mexico and it will quickly give you the answer to your question along with the most relevant links to MND articles to read. It’s an awesome tool. Check it out and I’m certain that you will be amazed!
Humanity is quickly moving into a new era in which AI is going to be able to do just about anything for us — including much of what we currently use our brain for. The team at MND is united in wanting to stay smart and is excited to be providing you with new tools to help those of you that want to do the same.
In an age of quickly generated artificial answers, we will need to actively challenge ourselves not to just consume information, but also challenge it, question it, and build our own understanding and opinions. So commit to reading at least one in-depth article a day. Search for content that offers a different perspective. Use these MND tools not just as products, but as part of your own personal gym for the mind. A key skill in the future is not just going to be learning what AI can do for us; but also determining what we choose to continue doing for ourselves.
Thank you for subscribing to MND and for supporting the work we do.
Travis Bembenek is the CEO of Mexico News Daily and has been living, working or playing in Mexico for nearly 30 years.
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