Is AI Making Us Dumb? (opens in new tab)

No matter how you slice this apple, it's going to be lopsided. The real problem is that true learning is hard, ugly work, and the vast majority of people simply don't have the grit to choose friction over shortcut. Lord knows, I wouldn't have put in the grinding effort to learn how to code if I could have just bot-it. To make matters worse, you have advertisers masquerading as influencers pushing the notion: if you're not shipping 10 features a day, you'll be left behind. It's a perfect damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

If we’re restricting ourselves to the United States, then we have to admit that we have been incinerating public education for decades. American schools have had to do more with less and eventually less with less, for as long as most of us have been alive. We have watched in the last 10 years and increasingly in the last five years high school graduates be less and less able to read.

None of this happened because of AI. We could if we want blame smartphones for it, but I think that’s also pretty dubious. We will probably succeed in blaming AI for this. If there is a history, it will get the dates wrong in the 21st-century as to when America lobotomized itself.

We are really not prepared for how few people can competently read and write coming to adulthood right now. It doesn’t matter because we’re gonna speed run the results. Kicking out immigrants en masse means that we can’t even lean on countries that teach their kids how to read and write.

I've been able to learn about niche topics far more after LLMs have become available. Reading through less materials, lets me learn about things right away. I'd say the same thing can happen for the students. The less friction to learning things usually makes things easier to learn. That leads the curious minds to more knowledge. That's a good thing.

Yes

since you have to ask, then no, AI isn't making you dumb, it's making you dumber.

@grok is this true?

Q: Is AI Making Us Dumb?

A: No.

From the substack:

We can’t fully blame AI. After all, it’s only been with us for the last four years. This decline began with the internet and got worse with smartphones.

yes