Is AI killing critical thinking? Inside Adele Zeynep Walton’s Off the Shelf talk

We have never had more answers at our fingertips. So why does it feel like we’re asking fewer questions?

I attended Sheffield’s event Off the Shelf to visit Adele Zeynep Walton’s talk about her award-winning book Logging Off: The Human Cost of Our Digital World. Walton is a 27-year-old journalist and author who is a tech justice activist. Alongside this, she won this month’s Waterstones best-seller.

Who is Adele Zeynep Walton?

Adele talked passionately about the contents of the book, covering addictive algorithms, online harassment, and the predatory digital design. Driven by the tragic loss of her sister due to the unsafe nature of these platforms.

Adele uses Logging Off  to critique the companies and platforms who denied all accountability and rather blame it on their everyday users. Instead of treating screen addiction as an individual moral failure, she demands for structural bans on predatory services. She wants to turn her book into action.

Alongside her book she co-founded the Logging-Off Club, a global movement that organises phone-free events across ten major cities, aiming to regain human connection, curiosity and well-being away from a digital screen. 

Adele’s personal experiences

To begin with she talked about her own experiences of social media and spoke about how her father set up her and her sister Aimee Walton’s Facebook accounts, it felt safe, and as if there was nothing to worry about.

However, Adele’s sister died by suicide in 2022 as she found a website founded by two men who encouraged women alongside Aimee to take their own lives. Adele talked about the dangers of these websites and said they had caused about 164 UK deaths. 

Implications of AI 

Alongside this, Zeynep covered the growing implications regarding AI, expressing her anger towards the lack of governmental response. She discussed tech policies and the 5Rights Foundation, which advocates for children’s rights within the digital world.

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Alongside this she expressed her view that “technology is not neutral.” She believes tech is shaped by the interests and priorities of those who develop and control it and these priorities are driven by profit over people.

Adele told the Sheffield Tab: “We are not witnessing the death of critical thinking, and there is no black or white answer, however it is dependent on the future of AI and how much regulation progresses around the internet and social media improves.”

An attendee of the event said: “There is definitely a need for these events, as well as another book festival called Hay Book Festival, which had the attendance of Michael Rosen there this year… There’s a significant decline in literacy after GCSE age.” 

They suggested that tickets to these talks should be given for free to children and students to help education and to spread awareness of important topics such as Logging Off.

What are we losing to technology?

Perhaps the real danger of AI isn’t that it will one day become capable of thinking for us, but that we will stop questioning whether it should. Adele’s talk serves as a reminder that technology is not neutral, and that behind every innovation are people, power and profit, that are possibly using it unmorally.

As AI becomes increasingly embedded in our everyday lives, the question is no longer simply what it can do for us, but what we risk losing in return. In a world where answers are becoming instantaneous, perhaps the most important thing we can do is keep asking questions. 

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