“It’s easy to see that it’s optimal to Uber to the restaurant,” I heard someone say at Duke last week. Lately, I’ve noticed a strange trend among my peers at Duke. Students, mostly those studying a field related to math, will casually drop phrases that sound like they belong in a proof or an algorithm. I’ve heard everything ranging from a simple “therefore” to an elaborate “as one can easily show.”
But it is not only math people. I have witnessed my friends in economics talk about how much they “discount” their future feelings as if their entire life neatly fits into an opportunity-cost model. Absurdly, these phrases come up even when we’re casually talking about what to eat for dinner.
Unfortunately, I’ve caught myself doing the same thing. Speech is contagious, and tools like ChatGPT make it easier to generate language that sounds polished. That polish, though, comes at a cost: our voices sound less human…