Test scores across OECD countries peaked around 2012 and have declined since. IQ scores in many developed countries appear to be falling after rising throughout the twentieth century. Nataliya Kosmyna at MIT’s Media Lab began noticing changes around two years ago when strangers started emailing her to ask if using ChatGPT could alter their brains. She posted a study in June tracking brain activity in 54 students writing essays. Those using ChatGPT showed significantly less activity in networks tied to cognitive processing and attention compared to students who wrote without digital help or used only internet search engines. Almost none could recall what they had written immediately after submitting their work. She received more than 4,000 emails afterward. Many came from teachers who reported students producing passable assignments without understanding the material. A British survey found that 92% of university students now use AI and roughly 20% have used it to write all or part of an assignment. Independent research has found that more screen time in schools correlates with worse results. Technology companies have designed products to be frictionless, removing the cognitive challenges brains need to learn. AI now allows users to outsource thinking itself.
Before I used Google Maps regularly, I would be more aware of road layout while driving and soon become capable of navigating any town I visited regularly, without a map. It’s weird to drive through a place I last visited twenty years ago, knowing that last time I was there I’d navigate based on memory, but now I’m completely leaning on that device to do it for me. That mental faculty might not be absolutely lost, but I don’t use it and I don’t suppose I would ever have developed it if I were learning to drive today.
Perhaps it’s obsolete, and a modern brain can now use those resources for something more relevant. Over the course of human history we have developed tools to use our finite mental resources more effectively, but never without a price. Socrates feared that the use of writing would weaken our memory and true understanding. I’m sure he was right, at least about the memory, but it was worth the price. Without writing, nobody would know what Socrates thought about anything.
But with AI, we’re not enabling ourselves to do more and develop new faculties, because AI seeks to be our universal crutch. Perhaps under other circumstances it could be better, but the entities pushing AI want us to be compliant consumers hypnotized by a endless stream of advertising slop. Fundamentally, they are not incentivized to help us develop our potential. They want to replace us.