Imagine for a moment you are a child in 1941, sitting the common entrance exam for public schools with nothing but a pencil and paper. You read the following: “Write, for no more than a quarter of an hour, about a British author.”
Today, most of us wouldn’t need 15 minutes to ponder such a question. We’d get the answer instantly by turning to AI tools such as Google Gemini, ChatGPT or Siri. Offloading cognitive effort to artificial intelligence has become second nature, but with mounting evidence that human intelligence is declining, some experts fear this impulse is driving the trend.
Of course, this isn’t the first time that new technology has raised concerns. Studies already show how mobile phones distract us, social media damages our fragile attention spans and GPS has rendered our navigational abilities obsolete. Now, here comes an AI co-pilot to relieve us of our most cognitively demanding tasks – from handling tax returns to providing therapy and even telling us how to think.
Where does that leave our brains? Free to engage in more substantive pursuits or wither on the vine as we outsource our thinking to faceless algorithms?
“The greatest worry in these times of generative AI is not that it may compromise human creativity or intelligence,” says psychologist Robert Sternberg at Cornell University, who is known for his groundbreaking work on intelligence, “but that it already has.”
The shamelessly biased mainstream media cartel outlets like the UK Guardian have done far worse things to collective human intelligence than AI has.
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