AI will make our children stupid | David James and Carl Hendrick | The Critic Magazine

Of all the recent signs that Western civilization is circling the drain, the most depressing is the apparent decline in IQs. The so-called Fly...

We may soon look back on this era of TikTok, Love Island and Zack Polanski as an age of dignity and restraint. If we stop reading at the current rate, our children will inherit a brave new world where books are viewed as arcane, even perverse, artifacts of a lost civilisation. They will stare at the Complete Works of Shakespeare much like a chimpanzee stares at an iPhone. When we started teaching we used to worry about the influence that cigarettes and alcohol, comics and television, were having on teenagers’ brains. Little did we know that those were our salad days, filled with such trifling trinkets of distraction compared to what we are facing now. It is axiomatic to say that attention is fundamental to learning, and strengthened attention can improve cognitive control, but over the last ten years we have seen attention spans weaken, reduced to a narrowness which makes teaching and learning not only increasingly difficult but actively resisted. The threat that AI poses to intelligence is existential: it allows children to outsource their thinking entirely. Fundamental skills like mental arithmetic, memorising text, or reading a map could soon be obsolete as cognitive offloading becomes a normal way of working. We are fast becoming what educationalist Daisy Christodoulou calls a “stupidogenic” society. We are building a world where the phone isn’t just smarter than the chimpanzee holding it — it’s the only one of the two doing any thinking at all. As Christodoulou argues, part of the problem is the technology, but it’s also the desire among people in positions of authority and influence, to embrace this Endarkenment. They believe that exams need to be adapted (read: abolished) in order to embrace AI. Of course, the opposite is true, and the fact is that at the very point that we need our brains more than ever — to be able to retain concentration so that we can learn and distinguish between what is real and what is AI slop — comes at the very same time we are voluntarily in the process of re-booting ourselves with a deeply flawed downgrade.