Long read: Are we living in a golden age of stupidity?

She begins with Nataliya Kosmyna, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “Kosmyna has been working on wearable brain-computer interfaces she hopes will one day enable people who cannot speak, due to neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, to communicate using their minds.

Kosmyna spends a lot of her time reading and analysing people’s brain states. Another project she is working on is a wearable device – one prototype looks like a pair of glasses – that can tell when someone is getting confused or losing focus. Around two years ago, she began receiving out-of-the blue emails from strangers who reported that they had started using large language models such as ChatGPT and felt their brain had changed as a result. Their memories didn’t seem as good – was that even possible, they asked her? Kosmyna herself had been struck by how quickly people had already begun to rely on generative AI. She noticed colleagues using ChatGPT at work, and the applications she received from researchers hoping to join her team started to look different. Their emails were longer and more formal and, sometimes, when she interviewed candidates on Zoom, she noticed they kept pausing before responding and looking off to the side – were they getting AI to help them, she wondered, shocked. And if they were using AI, how much did they even understand of the answers they were giving?

With some MIT colleagues, Kosmyna set up an experiment that used an electroencephalogram to monitor people’s brain activity while they wrote essays, either with no digital assistance, or with the help of an internet search engine, or ChatGPT. She found that the more external help participants had, the lower their level of brain connectivity, so those who used ChatGPT to write showed significantly less activity in the brain networks associated with cognitive processing, attention and creativity.

In other words, whatever the people using ChatGPT felt was going on inside their brains, the scans showed there wasn’t much happening up there.

The study’s participants, who were all enrolled at MIT or nearby universities, were asked, right after they had handed in their work, if they could recall what they had written. “Barely anyone in the ChatGPT group could give a quote,” Kosmyna says. “That was concerning, because you just wrote it and you do not remember anything.”

…As she observes, writing an essay requires skills that are important in our wider lives: the ability to synthesise information, consider competing perspectives and construct an argument….she received more than 4,000 emails from around the world, many from stressed-out teachers who feel their students aren’t learning properly because they are using ChatGPT to do their homework. They worry AI is creating a generation who can produce passable work but don’t have any usable knowledge or understanding of the material.

The fundamental issue, Kosmyna says, is that as soon as a technology becomes available that makes our lives easier, we’re evolutionarily primed to use it. “Our brains love shortcuts, it’s in our nature. But your brain needs friction to learn. It needs to have a challenge.”

If brains need friction but also instinctively avoid it, it’s interesting that the promise of technology has been to create a “frictionless” user experience, to ensure that, provided we slide from app to app or screen to screen, we will meet no resistance. The frictionless user experience is why we unthinkingly offload ever more information and work to our digital devices; it’s why internet rabbit holes are so easy to fall down and so hard to climb out of; it’s why generative AI has already integrated itself so completely into most people’s lives.

We know, from our collective experience, that once you become accustomed to the hyperefficient cybersphere, the friction-filled real world feels harder to deal with. So you avoid phone calls, use self-checkouts, order everything from an app; you reach for your phone to do the maths sum you could do in your head, to check a fact before you have to dredge it up from memory, to input your destination on Google maps and travel from A to B on autopilot. Maybe you stop reading books because maintaining that kind of focus feels like friction; maybe you dream of owning a self-driving car. Is this the dawn of what the writer and education expert Daisy Christodoulou calls a “stupidogenic society”, a parallel to an obesogenic society, in which it is easy to become stupid because machines can think for you?”

Technology was always meant to make us smarter. So, how did we get our brains to rot with this? She points to the ever so powerful tech industry which is using all its resources to doomscroll:

“…we spend too much time scrolling through rubbish online and the corrosive, aggressively dumb content itself, the nonsense memes and AI garble. When we hold our phones we have, in theory, most of the world’s accumulated knowledge at our fingertips, so why do we spend so much time dragging our eyeballs over dreck?

One issue is that our digital devices have not been designed to help us think more efficiently and clearly; almost everything we encounter online has been designed to capture and monetise our attention. Each time you reach for your phone with the intention of completing a simple, discrete, potentially self-improving task, such as checking the news, your primitive hunter-gatherer brain confronts a multibillion-pound tech industry devoted to throwing you off course and holding your attention, no matter what. To extend Christodoulou ’s metaphor, in the same way that one feature of an obesogenic society are food deserts – whole neighbourhoods in which you cannot buy a healthy meal – large parts of the internet are information deserts, in which the only available brain food is junk.”

She then introduces a concept of “continuous partial attention”: “..involuntarily state we often find ourselves in when we’re trying to toggle between several cognitively demanding activities, such as responding to emails while on a Zoom call. When I first heard the term I realised that I, like most people I know, live most of my life in a state of continuous partial attention, whether I’m guiltily checking my phone when I’m supposed to be playing with my kids, or incessantly sidetracked by texts and emails when I’m trying to write, or trying to relax while watching Netflix and simultaneously doing an online food shop, still wondering why I feel as chilled-out as an over-microwaved dinner. Digital multitasking makes us feel productive, but this is often illusory. “You have a false sense of being on top of things without ever getting to the bottom of anything,” Stone tells me. It also makes you feel permanently on edge: one study she conducted found that 80% of people experience “screen apnea” when checking their emails: they become so caught up in the endless notifications that they forget to breathe properly. “Your fight or flight system becomes up-regulated, because you’re constantly trying to stay on top of things,” she says, and this hypervigilance has cognitive costs: it makes us more forgetful, worse at making decisions and less attentive.” She talks about how the Netflix’s and Spotify’s of the world are cognizant of this and are producing content to suit the multi-tasking audience, which also means the content is of mediocre quality, lacking in depth.

She ends with how AI is adding to this malaise. The article is worth reading and sharing it widely with all those who we care about.