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By Gavin Boyle
A variety of human benchmark studies have indicated that human intelligence is declining as subjects across a variety of tests perform weaker than participants in the past.
“We’re all getting super lazy in our cognition because it’s getting super easy to do everything,” said Ruth Karpinski, a California psychologist who studies IQ. “We’re using Waze and Google Maps to get where we need to go. We’re losing our whole sense of compass.”
“When you can just say, ‘Alexa, do this,’ or ‘Siri, do that,’ as software becomes more and more sophisticated, there’s less the human mind has to do,” added Robert Sternberg, a psychology professor at Cornell.
Studies in the past years have found humans are declining in numerous intelligence-defining areas such as attention span and critical thinking skills. While there are many factors that contribute to this change, such as fewer people regularly reading and an ever-increasing reliance on technology, no one factor is entirely to blame. However, this problem is likely to only become worse as more people turn to AI chatbots to assist with cognitive-heavy tasks.
Many school-aged children are already outsourcing their work to AI, and as the technology becomes more mainstream, this offloading is becoming more popular. In January, Pew reported that 26% of teens aged 13 to 17 feed their homework into ChatGPT — double the 13% who did the same in 2023. While 74% of teens do not use the technology in this way, it is still a major concern that a quarter of the nation’s teens are using AI to complete their work, forgoing any learning and also robbing themselves of the skills they would learn while completing their schoolwork.
Even more concerning, AI is able to complete this type of work almost undetected and at a level that is higher than most students, leaving those seeking to simply score a high grade with little incentive not to cheat. While this provides these students with an advantage in the short-term, as they receive higher grades, it robs them critical skills in the long term — accelerating the decline in these benchmark cognitive tests.
Related: Is ChatGPT Use Becoming More Common Among School Kids?
At the same time, our technology has become increasingly more addictive, causing people to spend hours on their devices every day without even realizing just how much time they waste. The effect of this incessant scrolling is “brain rot,” a term used to describe the foggy brain people experience after being on their device for hours on end.
“They feel brain foggy, they [have] less concentration,” Dr. Kyra Bobinet told Fox News Digital about brain rot. “They can’t do deep work. And then there’s also this epidemic of loneliness that has been kind of sitting on the heels of this, because we can’t really focus on anything, including relationship-building.”
The best way to combat this decline in intelligence is to promote hobbies away from technology. Whether it be participating in sports or engaging in leisure activities such as reading or painting, we all need to spend less time on our devices and give our brains a chance to flex themselves, rather than allowing our technology to do all of the hard work.
Read Next: What Is ‘Brain Rot’? Oxford’s Word of the Year Highlights Social Media Epidemic
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