Are we living in a golden age of stupidity?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Things like electricity, computers, internet, smartphones and AI are those earthquakes caused by the tectonic movement towards dominance of the machine.
The goal of human progress was to make everything easier. Tools came up to augment human abilities, both physical and mental, so that humans can free themselves from all hard work of physical labor and thinking.
We do gym and sports as the body needs some fake activity to fool it into believing that we still need all that muscle strength. We might get some gym and sports for the mind too to give it some fake activity.
Remember, the goal is to preserve ourselves as physical beings while not really doing any hard work.
The Factorio devs are ahead of the curve on that front I guess.
Think about it: do we rather to live in a world where heavy labor is a necessity to make a living, or a world where we go to gym to maintain our physique?
If mental labor isn't (as) necessary and people just play Scrabble or build weird Rude Goldberg machines in Minecraft to keep their minds somewhat fit, is this future really that bleak?
Craftsmanship and tool usage are physical activities that also define us as a species and you will find no shortage of people lamenting our loss of those skills, too. Both those and thinking are categorically different than water carrying, ditch digging, and other basic heavy labor.
AI will never completely replace human thinking; it will just ease the annoying/boring parts.
The same arguments were given for the innovation of the calculator, but we didn't stop thinking with math/calculations, we just make the calculator do the boring computation part (and now you can calculate with much bigger and more complexe operation without having to spend loads of times and paper for it).
This _might, arguably_ be true, if the output was as good as their output would have been. Very limited evidence right now, but what there is is largely not promising, eg https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/04/m365_copilot_uk_gover...
If we end up with a society of people not thinking and producing nonsense, that seems fairly concerning.
My wife and I live about a mile from some favorite places to eat, but the walk home in the dark is dicey with a high speed limit and not a lot of lights, doubly so biking (she is not a strong pedaler). We end up driving even in the summer.
It's still more car-centric than it should be here - it's absurd how much space we waste on all these parked cars around - but fortunately it's been improving over time.
Even if a world where people don’t use their brains were desirable (that’s a humungous if), the present is definitely not the time to start. If anything, we’re in dire need of the exact opposite: people using their brains to not be conned by all the bullshit being constantly streamed into our eyes and ears.
And in your world, what happens when a natural disaster which wasn’t predicted takes out the AI and no one knows how to fix it? Or when the AI is blatantly and dangerously wrong but no one questions it?
You were clearly advocating for a particular future (“honestly believe (…) it’s a great thing”), so hiding behind it being a hypothetical feels disingenuous. Of course it’s an hypothetical, because it obviously does not describe the current state of the world. That doesn’t mean the idea is beyond criticism or commentary. On the contrary, that’s exactly what hypotheticals are for.
Imagine waking up one day and realizing this your senior year of college was over and you literally could not remember a single thing you learned that year, as though it never happened. That’s the idiocratic shift we’re seeing. AI is literally causing us to turn off our brains. A whole generation will learn nothing in school. Ask an educator how it’s going. I’ve heard from half a dozen. The consensus is “it’s a shit show”
Information overload, not matched with critical thinking; short attention spans, driven by algorithmic content; decline in deep reading, writing, and manual creativity
…then yes. There’s a legitimate case that we’re in a period of widespread mental passivity rather than active curiosity. Of course this isn’t a new phenomenon. Every generation feels the next is losing touch with something essential. What is different today is the scale and speed of digital influence.
Key point. The top use case for "Artificial Intelligence" is lack of natural intelligence.
PS Cute choice of sample size.
Maybe both are correct because most people are not using AI to generate their next SAAS passive income whatever.
>top use case for "Artificial Intelligence" is lack of natural intelligence.
Also true if you think about a situation where there is just not enough natural intelligence to accomplish something within its scope.
Maybe there never was enough natural intelligence for something or other, or maybe not enough any more.
It could be a lot more acceptable to settle for artificial in those cases more so than average, especially if there is a dire need,
But first you have to admit the dire lack of natural intelligence :\
...from the lacking intelligence, sure.
But from anyone else?
As the article emphasizes, "every technological advance seems to make it harder to work, remember, think and function independently …"
This is exactly what it takes for there to be a positive feedback mechanism for AI to accelerate. Almost like people havng the goal lines moved for them. Which it looks like AI has already done in spite of its notorious shortcomings.
That little quote doesn't only apply to AI, think about how it was as slide rule engineering faded into obscurity. Don't ask me how I know, that would be an even worse wall of text ;)
At one time all bridges, vehicles, aircraft and things like that were designed by people who had prevailed because their mindset was aligned with all the others who excelled at doing almost all the math necessary using only that one common tool, which was common among them because it was a best practice across so many cultures, and a leap above what they were using before. It wan't easy and it required a certain mindset which made engineering possible with such a primitive tool. Two pieces of wood.
The future's come a long way and nobody does this any more, so for the longest there's been no need for engineers to even learn how to use a slide rule, or especially not to use it professionally. Things actually did get easier. Slide rules were no longer necessary for engineering, and from that point the type of brain that could do those kinds of projects using only a slide rule has no longer been a requirement for who can become an engineer. This didn't make them stupid, engineering is still hard, naturally in many other ways.
But with that mindset that made it possible to accomplish so much with such primitive tools now largely absent, could that be why not much more is being accomplished with incredibly more advanced tools after so many decades?
A modern fighter jet can fly literal circles around one that was designed with a slide rule.
Computers have gained enormous complexity.
Medicine is doing all sorts of crazy stuff (biologic drugs and mRNA and so on).
I think you've hit the nail on the head, it's state-of-the-art.
Whatever the state-of-the-art at the time is.
>modern fighter jet can fly literal circles around one that was designed with a slide rule.
Yes, but not so easy to outperform the ones designed by those who had adequate talent using a slide rule, once those guys got a hold of mainframes.
Not all of those people are completely gone yet, mostly retired if still living, but they've been with us as senior engineers ever since, just dwindling numers.
But no new crops of that type of average engineer since the 1970's.
It might be beginning to show, things like B52's seem to have been impossible to replace ever since.
What are the odds of a dramatically different B52 replacement, designed today, lasting 60 years into the future and still operating routinely? If any could be made airborne by then anyway.
So all we need is a ban on every other programmer's employment of it.
I'll wait :)
Doesn't the decline of IQ rather correlate with smartphone ubiquity, particularly after 2010, and the steepest declines appear in 18-22 year-olds—the heaviest smartphone users? Multiple studies link smartphone addiction specifically to reduced cognitive abilities, not technology broadly.
A printed sign can do the same.
Try harder, A"I".
Yeah, but otherwise, the whole MIT Media Lab thing is increasingly tasting a little bitter, not the glamorous, enviable place it seemed like in decades past.
Rather than looking for the next internet-connected wearable, for some reason, increasingly, I keep thinking about Bruce Dern's character in the film Silent Running.
I eventually gave up and only ate to avoid having to deal with it.
Not that I’d trust an AI to get it right - but people already don’t.
In UK, works as designed... to maximise penalty earnings.
> “Our brains love shortcuts, it’s in our nature. But your brain needs friction to learn. It needs to have a challenge.”
"Our brains needs friction to learn" is a good way of summarizing the fundamental problem.
Yes, shortcuts can be great, but they also obviously stop you from actually learning. The question then becomes: Is that a bad thing? Or is the net results positive?
My guess is that "it depends" on the tasks and the missed learning. But losing things like critical thinking, the ability to learn and concentrate could be catastrophic for society and bad for individuals. And maybe we're already seeing the problems this creates in society.
I'm left wondering whether I should have just hand-coded what I was doing a bit slower, but kept my attention focused on the task
I like to fire the model off to do exploratory implementations as I refine the existing work.
I'm using Aider though, which makes this easy: it's just another tab in the terminal.
The earlier days of programming had more "blocking" since compilation was quite slow. So the issue is obviously that "blocking", but social media.
Worst offenders like Rust are "today", not "earlier".
Still, you seem to be arguing that the choice should be Pascal instead of Rust. There is a reason why we choose these new languages: language features. Compile time is a lesser consideration.
Do I mean that one should choose Pascal today? No, compiling C code today is really fast and has practically no "blocking" time. But you can still inflict yourself "blocking" time if you want, with languages like Rust.
Are things clearer now?
C++ was/is even worse what with generation of all the templated code and then through the roof link times for linker to sort out all the duplicate template implementations (ok, Solaris had a different approach but I guess that's a nitpick).
I have not worked on any large project in Pascal, but friends worked with Delphi and I remember them complaining how slow it was.
So, in my experience, it really was slow.
Nearly every time, your problems were detected _early_ in the process. Because build systems exist, they don't take 30 minutes on average. They focus on what's changed and you'll see problems instantly.
It's _WAY_ more efficient for human attentional flow than waiting for AI to reason about some change while I tap my fingers.
It's less cool than having a future robot do it for you while you relax, but if you enjoy programming it brings some of the joy back.
"What was I doing again!?" is a big problem
That’ll likely degenerate into “I want my AI to do dishes and laundry so I can code, not code so I can do my dishes and laundry”
It's like calculators didn't bring a golden age of bad maths. Instead people mostly stopped learning long division and used the calculator instead but the end result was ok.
In the past, the majority of people who could be heard by the "masses" tended to be educated and wealthy. Now, everyone gets a voice.
But seems the article is more about AI and how it may make us stupider. Which I have no opinion on.
While it's not presenting anything new, the article does cover a number of important talking points in an accessible way.
The title itself. Without reading the article, I can sense the "we are living in a stupid age" arrogant trope characteristic of the "winning" social classes.
I do know a few people who walk through the world with the "everyone else is an idiot" mindset. They're a total pain in the ass and neither of them are particularly successful or particularly happy, irrespective of their (very different) notional social class.
For my part, I look at a title like that and immediately think of the number of hours I've spent doomscrolling, trying to find value in cryptocurrencies, thinking about what impact AI has been having on education, trying to figure out where my life took its various difficult turns...
And I see it more as a criticism of the systems we've built (primarily big tech, but also the industrial complex in general) to create a world where the answer might be yes.