A June study from MIT Media Lab suggests that using ChatGPT to write essays results in “cognitive debt,” a fancy way to say that artificial intelligence makes you dumb. Critics of AI and social media regularly throw around terms like “continuous partial attention.” Or “brain rot.” In a Substack article on our “stupidogenic society” (more on that later), one commenter states, “Our society has become so smart we truly are stupid.” Ouch. But are we?
We’ve heard all this before. The Atlantic asked in 2008, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”—which I found from a Google search. My parents called television the “idiot box,” a term coined in the mid-1950s. Calculators, cars and probably candles and the abacus were considered a menace to society.
Still, the antitechnology backlash grows. We know that intelligence scores from 1932 to 1978 increased about three points every decade, the Flynn Effect. Each generation gets smarter. That’s too short for evolution, so scientists credit better nutrition or reduced exposure to lead. But IQ score growth slowed in teenagers starting in the 1990s and again in the 2000s. Hmmm, must be PCs and that darn internet.
In 2023 Northwestern researcher Elizabeth Dworak discovered a “reverse Flynn effect,” with youth scores dropping from 2006 to 2018 in three out of four “cognitive domains.” Facebook was released to the general public in 2006. The iPhone was introduced in 2007. It’s obviously their fault, right? Well, IQ scores are notoriously fickle.
Critics love to claim that technology enables addiction, anxiety, dopamine hits and doom-scrolling. A Guardian article that asks if we’re living in a golden age of stupidity includes this juicy quote: “It’s only software developers and drug dealers who call people users.” OK, then! Washington University researcher Scott Marek has cast doubt on the dopamine claim. No matter—technology is always to blame.
But remember, correlation isn’t causation. Recently Kim Kardashian, who has 354 million Instagram followers and just failed the California bar exam, revealed that scans showed troubling holes of “low activity” in her brain. Will social media be blamed? Almost guaranteed.
This summer, Daisy Christodoulou asked on Substack, “Are we living in a stupidogenic society?” The idea is that technology makes it easy for us to be stupid, similar to an obesogenic society when a move from human labor to machines (allegedly) made it easy to be overweight. Now we have “thinking machines,” so it’s easier than ever to be dumb.
Artificial general intelligence is moments away, they say, and we’ll all soon be dumber than ChatGPT. How come no one talks about the opposite—about a “smartogenic” society? Yes, by harnessing search and generative AI, it’s easier than ever to be smart. Too positive.
Instead, grumpy naysayers say our brains conduct “cognitive offload.” A paper titled “The Memory Paradox” states that “frequently offloading cognitive work to devices may cause certain ‘mental muscles’ to atrophy.” Mental muscles? That certainly sounds scientific. And Lane Brown, in New York magazine on “The Stupiding of the American Mind,” thinks as our influence circle expanded from family, co-workers and friends to unwashed strangers posting nonsense on social media that we’ve all had a “crowdsourced lobotomy.”
Hard to argue, except—remember that reverse Flynn effect? The one area where scores went up was 3-D rotation and spatial reasoning. Is that from a generation playing videogames like “Call of Duty”? Probably, but few point this out. Maybe Forrest Gump was right: “Stupid is as stupid does.”
Everyone can be smart. Global literacy was 12% in 1820. Were the rest unintelligent? Stupid? Hardly. Literacy is now 87%. Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, told me that if we put our mind to it, everyone is educable in every subject. Yes, worldwide math scores have been down for 20 years. Many students at the University of California, San Diego, can’t even do third-grade math. But that’s an indictment of our educational system, not technology.
Jonathan Haidt had a moment last year with his book “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness.” His plan to save our children: Limit smartphones. Ban social media before 16. More independence and free play. He might add going back to living in caves.
We need to fight fire with fire. Social media is fun and addictive. But the real world and jobs are technology-dependent and getting more so. AI is a productivity powerhouse. Rather than shielding youth from the future, make education as fun and addictive as technology, social media and AI.
Let’s face it, education hasn’t changed much since Miss Crabtree in the 1930s “The Little Rascals.” Embrace technology. Don’t ban it. Revamp teaching to leverage ChatGPT rather than block it. Go toe to toe with addictive social media. ChatGPT won’t make us dumb and dumber unless we let it. Instead, adopt and adapt AI to create an anti-dumb “smartogenic” society.
Write to kessler@wsj.com.