Probably, Simon Kuper is (mostly) right in his recent FT article (below). In general, Simon Kuper is a good writer. This article seems, however, rather keen to illustrate a negative view.
Slowly, I’m developing a more positive view about Artificial Intelligence (AI) because nowadays I’m actually using Google’s AI summaries. Before, I didn’t even bother as AI is largely a hype.
Early June 2023, I published my AI SWOT analysis:
With hindsight, I may have forgotten some additional items, like:
- strength: better use of available time (eg, efficiency, effectiveness);
- weakness: replace “making stuff up” by (the evolution of) stupidity.
I urge you to read Simon Kuper’s article below.
FT: The evolution of stupid
FT subtitle: AI is the latest in a sequence of inventions that have made humanity dumber
By: Simon Kuper
Date: 10 July 2025
“A class of schoolchildren here in Paris was sitting a test when a pupil dropped his phone. The kids had handed in their phones on entering the classroom, but this boy had a second one. It is claimed the supervisors let him pick it up and continue using ChatGPT to answer questions. French rules say he should have been banned from taking the baccalauréat, the final school exams. The school fears that if it did that, it would have to bar half the class. This is education in the age of artificial intelligence.
I sympathise with the child. School might be the last time he isn’t allowed to let AI do his work. Handing over to the machine will stunt his knowledge and intelligence. But then, his generation may not need much of either. Those qualities could die out painlessly as sword fighting or blacksmithery did.
AI is only the latest in a sequence of inventions that have made humanity dumber. We outsourced our maths skills to calculators, our memory to Google and navigation to Google Maps. Some time in the 1990s, the decades-long international rise in IQs began going into reverse.
Later, Google Translate handled foreign languages for us, while social media broke our concentration and reading habits. The FT’s John Burn-Murdoch reports: “Across a range of tests, the average person’s ability to reason and solve novel problems appears to have peaked in the early 2010s and has been declining since.” Adult literacy and numeracy have been stagnating or falling in most developed countries, says the rich-country club OECD.
Then, on November 30 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT.
Pundits debate whether AI will replace human workers, and, ultimately, kill us all. Discussion among university professors is less speculative. They can see inside the heads of the next generation, and report that AI is already making kids dumber. The professorial essay lamenting the death of thought (AI is the most broad-based threat to intelligence yet) has fast become a new literary genre. Students increasingly use large language models to write assignments and summarise reading lists. A professor who teaches foreign literature at a leading US university told me: “I used to be able to assign entire novels to my undergrads. The last decade, I could count on them to read five pages or so. Now the machine reads for them.” University administrators, having realised it’s almost impossible to prevent cheating through AI, are surrendering to it, signing partnerships with AI companies. Perhaps the purpose of university will now become to learn to use AI.
That allows our brains to atrophy. Even scientists at Microsoft Research, employed by a leading player in business’s AI race, found that as workers shift from executing tasks to overseeing AI’s output, the effects are twofold: “efficiency gains” and “risks of diminished critical reflection”.
How do we keep our intelligence? The answer may be, “What’s the point?” People who protect their minds by rationing their use of AI could become less efficient workers because large language models, even with their mistakes and hallucinations, are already smarter than us. Humans lost their swordsmanship and weaving skills once machines took over most fighting and weaving. Thinking and writing may go the same way. To anyone who imagines that we’ll curtail AI for the good of humanity: we didn’t with social media and climate change.
Sections of our brain could wither into evolutionary vestiges, like the wings of birds that lost their need for flight in the absence of predators. Our children could be liberated from thought. One day, even the speech of Donald Trump may seem of unfathomable complexity to them, the way Jimmy Carter’s presidential language must seem to many contemporary Americans.
I used to imagine that once AI did our thinking, humans could retreat to jobs that required empathy, such as carer or tennis coach. That was naive. Already “AI companions”, essentially chatbots who can study your personality and aim to please it, are outcompeting humans at social interaction. One such platform, Character.AI, “says it receives 20,000 queries per second”, or about one-fifth of Google’s estimated search volume, reports MIT Technology Review. Character.AI is now being sued by the mum of a Florida teenager who died by suicide after his relationship with an AI companion. (A judge rejected the company’s claim that its chatbots were protected by the first amendment.)
One day, this column will be written by a bot, but better. Commenters, please fill in your own jokes here, though the AI can do that too.”
Sources:
- Financial Times, 10 July 2025: The evolution of stupid
- archived text version via Twitter/X
0 Comments