Ashley Forkey, S.M.ASCE, is graduate student from South Florida studying civil engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is on a structural mechanics and design track.
Forkey graduated from Tufts University in May 2026 with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and a minor in engineering management.
She has gained research and internship experience in geotechnical engineering along with experience in structural engineering and computer-aided design.
Forkey has been involved in ASCE throughout her student years and is passionate about using engineering to support resilient communities, as well as bridging the gap between student experience and professional practice.
In her column A Grad Student’s View, previously titled An Undergraduate’s View, Forkey documents her experience as an ASCE student member navigating her civil engineering studies.
I realize this is a bold claim, and an imperfect comparison, but it is one that I think about regularly, so I’ll start from the beginning.
I was in roughly third grade when people around me began getting Snapchat. By seventh grade, my mom finally gave in, and I joined the friends who had already been communicating there for years. If I wanted to stay connected to my middle-school basketball team, joining the Snapchat group chat was almost a requirement.
Then came Instagram in high school, with its implicit emphasis on curating a polished version of oneself. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if LinkedIn functions similarly, albeit in a more socially acceptable or professional form. Snapchat encouraged documenting everyday experiences in fleeting moments. Instagram preserved carefully selected highlights, allowing us to present an intentional version of ourselves to others.
LinkedIn, in some ways, shifts that performance from social identity to intellectual and professional identity, emphasizing accomplishment, ambition, and productivity. Social media didn’t leave us in our adolescence; it has grown with us. Now, to be a professional engineer, you are expected to have an immediately accessible, curated persona via LinkedIn.
These platforms do not just shape how we present ourselves; they also shape how we relate to one another.
It is striking that younger generations are described as more digitally connected than any generation before them, while simultaneously reporting increased feelings of loneliness and social disconnection. Although social media has undeniably created meaningful opportunities for communication and access to information, it has also changed the structure of societal interactions. Algorithms increasingly personalize what we see, often reinforcing existing interests, opinions, and behavioral tendencies. This makes it easier to remain within familiar intellectual or social spaces rather than encounter perspectives that challenge us and lead to growth. We are trapped in the echo chambers that algorithms design for us and it has led to us becoming tribalistic and defensive communicators. Outrage increases engagement and engagement increases profit. It’s as simple as that.
At the same time, digital platforms are highly effective at sustaining attention, which is due to a type of slot-machine design. Similarly to gambling, social media is addictive. Notifications, likes, comments, and infinite scrolling mechanisms create environments of continuous simulation and feedback. While this can have benefits, it also raises questions about how constant accessibility to digital engagement influences attention, boredom, patience, and especially interpersonal behavior. Social media is designed to trick us into feeling like we are socializing. This false sense of socializing is what leaves people feeling even lonelier once they stop scrolling. As crazy as it sounds, once people feel this loneliness (or what I call “unidentifiable impending doom”) they are more quickly inclined to turn back to social media to mitigate these feelings. The short-term spike in dopamine that social media can cause provides them some temporary relief.
I think that technology has altered, not replaced, the way that people practice socialization.
This has caused me to wonder whether artificial intelligence could have a similar effect on reasoning and problem-solving. These are two fundamental traits that, in my opinion, represent what it means to be an engineer.
Previous generations of students, regardless of ability or motivation, often had to work through uncertainty to complete assignments or solve problems. Even partial understanding required some degree of struggle, iteration, and deductive reasoning. However, AI tools can now provide immediate explanations, summaries, and potential solutions. This can offer extraordinary educational benefits, but it may also reduce the extent to which students independently wrestle with ambiguity.
I do not think the question at hand is whether AI is “good” or “bad.” Rather, it is how repeated reliance on these systems might influence the habits of thinking we develop over time. Struggle is fundamental to learning and there is no longer a need to struggle when we can outsource our own thoughts instead of brute-forcing our way in times of frustration.
We often learn communication through discomfort: awkward conversations, failed attempts at connection, misunderstandings, and moments of vulnerability. Social media has changed how my generation practices these interactions, making it easier to avoid discomfort and weakening face-to-face communication. Similarly, reasoning develops through uncertainty, frustration, and repeated attempts at solving difficult problems. I believe social media shaped communication for my generation, and I believe AI will shape deductive reasoning for the next, as students increasingly turn to technology before wrestling through problems independently. These processes are not always enjoyable, but they are formative.
I notice this dynamic in small ways in everyday life. On trains, planes, or in waiting rooms, moments where spaces created by civil engineers once may have invited conversation or quiet observation are now dominated by phones. I understand that technology offers convenience, distraction, and comfort. I think a critical part of our development as human beings is lost when discomfort becomes avoidable. We no longer need to “really” sit in a room with other people, or even with our own thoughts for that matter.
Since I have become increasingly aware of this tendency, I have made small strides to resist it. tendency. Although I don’t think I’m any less attached to social media than any other recent college graduate, I do try to make conversation with taxi drivers, speak to people sitting near me on planes, and stop to ask strangers about their dogs – not just pet them. And I’ve noticed a pattern: people initially appear surprised and then genuinely pleased to connect, even briefly.
Our desire for connection has not disappeared. Our habits around it have just changed.
A person’s habits shape who they become whether they like it or not. If you run every morning, one day you will wake up and you will be a runner. If you bake regularly, one day you will be a baker. Thinking, too, I believe functions as a practice rather than a fixed ability. Learning how to search for information, evaluate evidence, cope with uncertainty, and arrive at conclusions, I think, matters more than the conclusions themselves.
This all raises questions that I don’t know how to answer. What happens when highly motivated individuals begin outsourcing parts of their thinking because of time constraints or productivity pressures? What happens when students rely on tools before developing foundational reasoning skills? Could habitual dependence on AI negatively shape how future generations approach problem solving, or will it instead augment human reasoning in productive ways? I don’t know.
Social media was designed to make communication quicker, easier, and more accessible. It succeeded. People can use social media to maintain relationships across distance, communicate instantly, and find communities they would not have encountered otherwise. But making communication easier did not make better communicators.
In many ways, communication is weaker than ever. I think my generation has become less practiced at uncomfortable conversations, more likely to retreat into phones during moments of discomfort, and less accustomed to speaking with strangers or navigating disagreements face-to-face. Misunderstandings increasingly occur through screens, where tone, body language, and nuance are lost. Communication has become faster and more convenient, but also less thoughtful and less resilient because it is less practiced.
I think AI will follow a similar trajectory with deductive reasoning. AI is designed to make thinking quicker, easier, and more efficient. It will help people summarize information, generate ideas, and solve problems faster. But just as making communication easier did not strengthen communication, making reasoning easier will not strengthen reasoning. If students no longer need to sit with uncertainty, struggle through difficult questions, or independently work toward answers, the habits that develop deductive reasoning will weaken through lack of practice. For younger students, they may not weaken because they will not develop at all.
I do not think technology is inherently harmful, or that progress should be resisted. Social media expanded connection and AI will continue to expand access to knowledge. My concern is simpler: when technology removes the friction through which we learn, we risk losing the skill that friction helps build. If communication improves through discomfort and reasoning develops through struggle, then the question is not whether we use these tools but how we use them without outsourcing the parts of ourselves that make us human.
There is no body of knowledge without bodies of thinkers.
If we don’t think, we will never know.
