AI and Asimov's The Feeling of Power

I used to read a lot of science-fiction growing up, including voraciously reading anything I could lay my hands on that was written by Isaac Asimov. It's been fun to see how over the last few years Asimov's work has become more relevant than ever: as humanity is beginning to navigate the foothills of the singularity, Asimov's I, Robot literary universe and his Three Laws of Robotics are providing a helpful guide for how to think about issues of AI safety and alignment, and are being frequently discussed in those contexts.

Separately from the laws of robotics, Asimov has a little-known short story called The Feeling of Power, published in 1958, which also suddenly feels extremely relevant.

In the story, a future Earth-based society called the Terrestrial Federation is waging a war with Deneb, which, it is implied, is pointless and going nowhere. Much like in 1958, politicians and military men are calling the shots. A low-ranking technician named Myron Aub unintentionally creates a storm of excitement by rediscovering how to do basic arithmetic, a skill that humans have long since forgotten after delegating it to computers. The people in charge are skeptical at first, refusing to believe that the human brain is capable of such feats, but before too long are made to recognize that there are real and valuable possibilities inherent in training humans to think about numbers for themselves without the aid of a computer. Aub is hailed as a hero and elevated in pay and status, but is then discouraged by seeing his discovery being turned to the service of making the war more efficient instead of for socially beneficial uses. The ending is powerful, but I won't spoil it. Read the story yourself.

My summary doesn't do the story justice, nor does the more detailed one on Wikipedia. Asimov's descriptions of people's reactions to seeing a human perform arithmetic for the first time are very entertaining; on rereading the story, I am reminded that in addition to his keen insights into science, technology, and human societies, Asimov was simply a damn good writer. What I find most striking however is how prophetic the story rings when read from today's perspective. Asimov's story was clearly warning us about the dangers of our mental skills atrophying due to the use of computers, long before computers or even electronic calculators were commonplace. In a modern context, my colleagues in academia and I are nowadays beginning to see exactly the kind of decline in mental abilities the story foretells among our students due to their increasing reliance on AI. This phenomenon has recently been referred to as cognitive atrophy, is discussed in numerous research papers and popular articles, and is a very real and growing source of concern. It is a testament to how much of a visionary Asimov was that he was already thinking about such things - and much else - back in 1958.