Are We Living in a Golden Age of Stupidity?

> an AI waste-sorting assistant named Oscar can tell you where to put your used coffee cup.

A printed sign can do the same.

Try harder, A"I".

> Gerlich recently conducted a study, involving 666 people of various ages, and found those who used AI more frequently scored lower on critical thinking. (As he notes, to date his work only provides evidence for a correlation between the two: it’s possible that people with lower critical thinking abilities are more likely to trust AI, for example.)

Key point. The top use case for "Artificial Intelligence" is lack of natural intelligence.

PS Cute choice of sample size.

I find when I do a lot of AI coding, or any "blocking" task with AI, I inevitably end up scrolling social media. And I feel dumber.

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

Insulting title. Sorry, but no thanks.

The article sounds a cliche. The progression was always happening, nothing sudden. Just like the continuous movement of tectonic plates through the earth quakes. When tension between the plates reach a level, rupture happens. But it is not the rupture causing the tectonic movement. It is the opposite.

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.

If ChatGPT generated the text, participants weren't encoding it into memory through the cognitive processes normally involved in writing; they were essentially passive recipients of AI output. Isn't it a trivial finding then, that participants could barely recall a text they didn't write? Also, the study is small (54 participants), not peer-reviewed, and conflates two different issues: the cognitive effort during task completion versus memory retention afterwards.

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.

I do not think so when compared to past ages. The only difference now is we get to see "stupid" due to the internet.

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.

Judging by the comments on any HN post that has to do with finance, yes.

> The fundamental issue, Kosmyna says, is that as soon as a technology becomes available that makes our lives easier, we’re evolutionarily primed to use it.

> “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.

The Guardian raises tabloid press to a new level of bad taste, posing a serious faced question about stupidity and immediately answers it by having their site drop a blocking full screen emotionally loaded ad-request for my money in the sloppiest way possible. I will assume the content it blocked was AI generated bait and will find a better article to read.

The article is along the lines of students not being as good because they slack off and use chatgpt, but people working together with chatgpt might produce smarter results than people before?

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.

Are we living in a golden age of stupidity? hat depends on what we mean by "stupidity." If we mean:

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.

Until recently every technological advancement replaced manual work, like in agriculture, transportation, industry. Even the tiniest car amenity, like electric windows, hydraulic breaks or touch screen entertainment is aiming to replace a limb movement. With AI it is the first time the tech offloads directly cognitive tasks, leading inevitably to mental atrophy. The hopeful scenario is to repurpose the brain for new activities and not rotting, like replacing labor work gives the opportunity for sports and not getting fat.