for those rolling their eyes on link aggregator linking to another link aggregator - this is the actual original article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/18/are-we-living-in-a-golden-age-of-stupidity-technology
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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And it was posted in this community recently.
My bad, I never saw it 🤷♂️
There was a Twitter exchange Erich did the screenshotted rounds a year or so ago, which went something like this:
Tweet 1:
Sometimes i spend so long crafting the perfect prompt that i realise what the solution is and don’t even have to ask ChatGPT
Tweet 2:
Bro just discovered “thinking”
Using AI as a rubber duck is what he did. I've used you guys in that manner. Quit a couple of asklemmy posts I had started because crafting the question and explaining the issue led me to a resolution.
Yup. Makes me wonder if they teach people rubber duck debugging any more.
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From the OG Guardian article:
“It’s only software developers and drug dealers who call people users,” Kosmyna mutters at one point, frustrated at AI companies’ determination to push their products on to the public before we fully understand the psychological and cognitive costs.
I disagree for a ton of reasons but what a great line.
Yes, but not for the reasons this article points out.
People have been proud to be stupid and afraid of knowledge for decades.
Oh yeah? C'mere a minnit and say that to me face
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People were ignorant in previous centuries because they didn't know better. Today they are willfully ignorant in spite of having the facts available.
the issue with becoming more knowledgable about the world is you feel less special.
and people are desperate to feel special. our entire consumer economy is built around exploiting folks insecurities and convincing them that their purchases make them better than other people.
Dunno, I'm autistic, I love feeling less special. That usually involves meeting right kind of people.
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If this is starting post 2012, then social media is probably also to blame.
Yep, that's certainly what started it, AI just made it way worse
I saw a YouTube video from a professor that explains how our brains need at least 15 minutes of nothing so it can be creative. Everyone now has a smart phone that takes that away from us. AI is just next level taking that away from us. It’s destroying all our minds.
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.
Looking around at my family, neighbors and coworkers getting hoodwinked by AI left and right... yeah that tracks.
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A slashdot post? Is it Y2K?
i suspect slahdot people are quite happy in their bubble there without the facebook and other users...
Yes I am 😁
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Also heavy metals:
Increased blood lead level in children has been correlated with decreases in intelligence, nonverbal reasoning, short-term memory, attention, reading and arithmetic ability, fine motor skills, emotional regulation, and social engagement. … The effect of lead on children's cognitive abilities takes place at very low levels.
High blood lead levels in adults are also associated with decreases in cognitive performance and with psychiatric symptoms such as depression and anxiety.
Lead poisoning # By organ system - Wikipedia
And microplastics:
And ragebait:
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Oh, hey, what's this article about Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theory that stupidity enabled Nazis?
Hur hur... Bonhoeffer. You're mom's a Bone Hoeffer.
Yeah, I was recently introduced to Bonhoeffer, his insight is incredible and the fact that similar mistakes are taking place today.
Peter Turchin is as close to Hari Seldon I think we’ll have, his models point to a lot of turmoil in the future.
I guess, yes? When social engineering is stronger than free will and common sense then I'd call that gullible/stupid.
I could say anything is a crutch that removes the burden from our minds. Calculators remove the burden of doing basic math and map apps remove the burden of maintaining a mental map. Both of these can result in a person who can't independently do basic calculations or navigate and won't understand the methodology behind the calculations. Now if this is a problem is open to debate.
Now using AI to avoid learning is a problem since it results in fraud. "I claim I understand this but I don't."
This is a great conversation because I'm one of those people who's terrible at arithmetic, but quite good at math. As in: I can look at a function, visualize it in 3D space, see what different max, mins and surfaces are dominated by what terms etc, but don't ask me to tally a meal check. I'd be useless at applying any math without a calculator.
Similarly, there's a lot of engineers out there that use CAD extensively that would probably not be engineers if they had to do drafting by hand.
The oatmeal did a comic that distilled this for me where they talked about why they didn't like AI "art". They made the point that in making a drawing, there are a million little choices made reconciling what's in your head with what you can do on the page. Either from the medium, what you're good at drawing, whatever, it's those choices that give the work "soul". Same thing for writing. Those choices are where learning, development, and style happen, and what generative AI takes away.
That helped crystalize for me the difference between a tool and autocomplete on steroids.
Edit: to add: you're statement "I claim to understand but don't" hits it on the head and is similar to why you have to be careful if plagiarism in citing academic review papers. If you write YOUR paper in a way that agrees with the review but discuss the paper the review was referencing, and, even accidentally, skip over that the conclusion you're putting forward is from the review, not the paper you're both citing, that's plagiarism. Notion being you misrepresented their thoughts as your own. That is basically ALL generative AI.
Not me. Because I am smart.I know because I'm smart. If I were stupid, I wouldn't know. See?
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massive inequality is not just income disparity
Devo was right.
I want someone to do a study of people who graduate from St johns vs people from say nyu or similar and how they function in today’s society.
the individual matters more than the education. i know several st johns graduates whose personality is yes-men. i have a liberal arts education from an ivy and 95% of my peers at uni thought it was stupid and just wanted job skills. they didn't give a fuck about learning or education, they just went there so they could get a job at goldman or similar and get rich or because their parents told them had to. they thought i was mentally ill for valuing liberal arts and focusing on education rather than getting a big fat paycheck after graduating.
a Socratic education only works if you already inclined towards skeptical inquiry. you can't educate people into skepticism, it's really an emotional disposition. normal people do not want to think anyone than they want to run marathons. only a small percentage of people are inclined to such activities.
i taught philosophy for 3 years, about 500 students. maybe a dozen of them actually learned anything... the other 490 were just there for a requirement/grade/elective and did absolutely did not give a fuck other than thinking quoting Plato make them sound smart and win arguments, or help them further entrench themselves in their delusional conspiracy mindset. had about 50% of my students actively argued for exploiting slaves for business profits, because all that mattered was their own wealth.
for every liberal atheist skeptic linux genius here on lemmy, there about a 100+ people who believe the opposite out there in the real world.
a Socratic education only works if you already inclined towards skeptical inquiry
Or if you just accost people in the streets like Socrates :b
I work at a top university and can confirm that the overwhelming majority of students are concerned primarily about jobs. It doesn't matter how good the school is; this is an effect of industrialization and more importantly education being reduced to a means for economic development and productivity. In my experience, it is ironically worse at the "better" schools where acceptance is highly competitive. If I'm being honest, a good community college is the sweet spot: teachers invested in teaching and students with the leisure and/or low risk/investment in just learning things for the heck of it.
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Damn I was going to blame the co2 in the atmosphere
We should, it's a factor:
I found the old A-Level maths exam paper that I actually did and just couldn’t remember how to do any of it. In my forties I feel like it would be much harder to re-learn how to factor and integrate quadratics, but not impossible, but mostly I don’t feel like the intense pressure of rote learning and exams when I was 18 actually got anything to stick.
So I’m pretty skeptical about any broad declarations about whether education is working or not. Almost all we can do is teach children how to think for themselves, self-teach, and critically evaluate information sources, and then hope for the best.
I hear ya. Math is harder the further my time separates from high school.
We are living in the golden age of the MAGAt.
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