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.