From the Editor’s Desk: Stupider (Premium)

We were hanging out with a friend who owns a local bar, and it was a slow night, so it was a good time to catch up. I half-jokingly suggested that we get something to eat that was different from our usual–a surprisingly good sourdough pizza–when the friend noted that I hadn’t even wanted to try that the first time I visited because there were so many carbs. This was four years ago, so I was surprised he remembered that, and then he rifled off a set of memories from that time, surprising me even more.

“You’re having a real Flowers for Algernon moment,” I joked, referring to the book and subsequent movie, which was called Charlie for some reason. He had no idea what I was talking about. He had never heard of either.

This paused the conversation so I could explain it. This friend is from Mexico, and has lived there his entire life, but he’s one of several people we know in Mexico City who isn’t just stunningly bilingual but also has an incredible understanding of English-language music, books, movies, TV shows, and other cultural information. He’s so good at this, I sometimes forget I didn’t grow up with him. Which doesn’t make any sense at all, given that he’s 20 years younger than me. But that’s the illusion when you meet someone like this.

Most of the people we know here are bilingual, of course. But even those who express themselves perfectly in English sometimes falter. We were chatting with a bartender friend at a different place one night when she told us she had just moved into a new apartment. My wife, lulled into a false sense of common worldview, just as I had been, then asked, “What’s the new apartment like?”

“Like?” she responded, confused.

And then after a pause, she answered, “it’s like an apartment.”

Hilarious. But back to Flowers for Algernon. After I had explained the story to him, he assumed I meant that he was like Charlie, the protagonist in the book, on the downward curve of his experience, when his surgery-induced genius starts to fade. In other words, he thought it was an elaborate joke, the type of insult that male friends seem to share effortlessly. And, yes, I can tell you from experience that that type of thing is cross-cultural.

But it isn’t what I meant. “No, no, you’re on the upside of the curve, you’re nailing it,” I told him. I couldn’t believe his sudden recall, and the details he came up with. Then he joked about not drinking too much and thus not having a hangover, and that must be it. And the conversation moved on.

But having watched him and then thinking of Flowers for Algernon, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. The story is tragic for all the obvious reasons, and reading it as a child, I could viscerally understand how terrifying it would be to not just lose your facilities, but know that it was happening and being helpless to prevent it. This is a real-life tragedy that plays out around the world every day, of course, as people start succumbing to Alzheimer’s and other diseases and disorders. They have moments of lucidity that surprise those around them. But they must also be suffering, trapped inside a body and brain that no longer respond to them as before.

I have written before about a minor version of this fear, about being a life-long reader, a voracious reader, and a writer of words, and yet my attention span and ability to read long form content has gone down as I’ve gotten older. Like many in this position, I’ve tried to understand why this happened. And I’ve taken steps to try and reverse it. I’ve also identified similar issues, always tied to technology, that have worked to subvert our collective intelligence or education. For example, the steady decline in how we consume news so that now so many are addicted to TikTok videos, Facebook memes, and other nonsense. We no longer trust science or experts, and we rail like children against anyone who disagrees with us.

I call this “the McDonald’s principle,” the idea being that its makers didn’t set out to make America fat, they set out to address a massive cultural shift in which many could suddenly afford cars and spent a lot of time in those cars; they would need a place to get good food quickly, and on-the-go, and many of them would eat that food not in a restaurant, but in those cars. This is unintended consequences of the highest order, as McDonald’s went on to a level of success its originators never foresaw.

Because AI is advancing so quickly right now, there are predictable fears that this incredible technology is somehow making us all stupider. We race to embrace it because it works, and we start to see all the ways it can help us with our lives. But by doing so, the critics worry, we are also losing our ability to think critically. We are become slaves to this technology, overly reliant on its capabilities. And it is only going to get worse. We will all turn into Charlie from Flowers for Algernon as the upward curve of enlightenment inevitably crested, and we hit the downward part of the curve.

Sure.

I have issues with this line of thinking.

First, and perhaps more obviously, we’ve done this before. And so have our predecessors in older generations. Every single time there’s a new technological breakthrough, the Luddites come out of the woodwork to tell us we’re doomed. That we’re getting stupider.

I bet we could name over 100 examples between us, but here are just a few. The ballpoint pen. The automobile. Photography. Digital photography. Smartphone photography. The steam-powered train and then electric and gas-powered trains. Airplanes. Electric cars.

I often remind people, even though no one reading this, myself included, remembers it, as we weren’t even born yet, that the first generation of people who owned their own automobiles had to be expert mechanics, too. That those vehicles were so unreliable, and so constantly in need of upkeep and repair, that expertise was required. But as cars got more reliable and simpler, that was no longer an issue. Expect to the generation that had become expert mechanics: To them, the new generation was stupider. Something that they felt was important–their expertise–was taken away.

This story repeated itself as the stick shift manual transmission gave way to the automatic transmission. And that’s one I did experience. I always enjoyed a stick shift, and owned many cars like that. But I’ve always commuted using a car with a stick shift, and I can tell you there is nothing worse than being stuck in traffic with such a vehicle. Automatics are better. They just are.

This story is about to repeat itself again, and you can already see the car enthusiasts lining up to pre-argue that self-driving cars will never work, that they will never give up driving, that this is a great joy in life. That coming generation is going to miss out. And they’re right, that coming generation will miss out on traffic jams caused by people like those old-timers who think they should be driving cars in an age in which this can be automated, saving us all time and money. It’s OK, they’ll pass on someday, and we’ll get our roads–and our sanity–back.

These things, to me, are generational biases, and they’re doomed to repeat themselves as time and technology moves forward and the biased do not. These are the things that “seem” right, or are to them traditions. But they are also bad ideas, old ideas, that will be replaced. That need to be replaced.

And yet.

I grew up in a world in which you needed to know your way around, and you would have paper maps in your car for long drives. My first cross-country drive occurred in 1985, in a 1972 VW Super Beetle–yes, a stick shift–and a friend and took five days to complete this trek, using just a single map of the entire country. We got lost multiple times, had multiple flat tires–another issue from older cars that has disappeared like magic in recent decades–and I am pretty sure I had less than $130 in my pocket when we left. Why our parents even allowed this to happen is incredible. As is the fact that we made it safely home.

But this and similar experiences growing up taught me the importance of understanding where you were in the world, which directions things were, and why having a “sense of direction” was important. As a technology enthusiast, I at first struggled with map advances like Mapquest, which we used to print maps on paper before long trips, and then more recent advances like Google Maps with all the live updates and uncanny ability to predict the exact length of each trip. Google Maps is making people stupider!

I even have examples of why this is so. My daughter never learned the names of any streets or places where she’s lived, and she drives around every day, not worried about this at all because she has a smartphone. My niece, who’s incredibly smart and just graduated from college with honors, is just as bad when it comes to geography. And when her dad started ripping into her for this, I piled on too. She blurted out, “Who cares about geography?!”

Indeed. I mean, I do. But where does this end? Did replacing paper and pen with a typewriter make us dumb? Dedicated word processing devices? PCs with ever more powerful word processing software that delivered WYSIWYG capabilities and advanced spell checking and grammar? Are we stupider from this? Or would it be stupider to not use it? I debate these things a lot. But in the end, the winning hand always comes up technology. You would be stupid not to use these advances. Sorry, Luddites.

But AI seems to have shaken the ol’ hornets nest when it comes to this line of thinking. It’s making people crazier instead of stupider. Microsoft announced Bing chat in February 2023, and here we are, just over two years later, and AI is rapidly infusing everything in personal technology. We’re seeing that same generational bias, the fear from experts of all kinds, that what makes them special is being given away to, well, everyone. We’re all really unhappy with this. And, of course, we’re hearing the same old arguments yet again. Of course we are.

AI, we’re told, is going to make developers stupider. You know, before it replaces those developers.

And AI, even more dramatically, is going to make everyone stupider. Hell, it already is. THERE ARE STUDIES!!

Relax. In the span of time, in the era in which human beings have been considered human beings, AI has existed for less than one one-hundredth of one second. Give it a second. It’s going to be OK. And it’s going to be OK for all the same reasons that technology has pretty much always been a net positive. It’s going to help. Overall and in general.

I mentioned attention span and long-form content up top. Here’s another example.

I saw a story today that the Netflix series You is coming back for its final season later this month. My wife and I really enjoy You, so this is good news. Like a lot of modern series, the first season or two is better than the rest. And because this is Netflix–enshittification at its finest—I’m sure they will cut this final season into two parts so that we can’t see the end of it until May or June. Fine, whatever. But my problem here is one I face with a lot of these shows, dating back to Lost, which kind of kicked this mess off (at least for me). And that problem is that I can’t remember much about the previous season of the show. Maybe more.

Thinking about this, I had this vague idea that it took place internationally, but not in Paris as hinted at the end of the previous season. And then I remembered something. It took place in England. But that was about it. I don’t recall how they left it.

And that’s fine. Netflix always shows up with a “previously on…” video that will bring us up to date. Not a major technological advance, of course, it’s a small thing. But it’s one of many things that make streaming services like this such a better overall experience than the previous ways we used to watch content like this. And that’s kind of the point. No, that’s literally the point. It’s going to be OK.

We’re not getting stupider because of AI. But we do have choices about how we spend our time, and how or if we choose to educate ourselves or be taken up in these waves of uneducated, unintelligence online nonsense. And that’s the real stupidity here. We are getting stupider in some ways. But that’s a personal decision. As with any tool, you can use technology for good. Or you can use it for bad. It’s up to you.

Kids these days.