AI Is Making Us Stupid

Our reliance on AI tools is making us stupid. 

We’re not inherently stupid (probably), but we are addicted, and the addition is rotting our brain. 

The addiction is immediacy, shortcutting, and the illusion of capability - the dopamine hit of vibe coding, or getting a satisfyingly ordinary bullet point summary from the LLM - which isn’t really capability or problem solving, but outsourcing a solution and copy-pasting the output. 

The good news is that it is not wholly our fault. 

There is a well provisioned infrastructure of capital, concrete, electricity, water, and powerful behavior psychology underwriting the machinations of the models that direct our life. We are, as it is, active participants in a massive social experiment. 

The experiment is relinquishing our creativity and critical thinking to a probability matrix; acquiescing to a ‘frictionless’ simulated existence in a world that demands friction; handing over our privacy and personal thoughts to bot ‘therapists’; willfully submitting to intellectual bondage by ceding mental capability to unregulated tools produced and marketed by monopolies seeking to invalidate our role in society with the very technology they claim is necessary for us to thrive in their engineered marketplace. 

Our modern digital life is a control study without the guardrails of scientific procedure and human ethics. The digital space that is being occupied by LLMs is contrived by billionaires to force a dependence on a technology that no one asked for and that, increasingly, is at odds with basic decency and objective truth. The hallucination of the machine is not a side effect, it is the feature. The entire business model of the model is a hallucination. 

It is the hallucination of economic equilibrium and populism as wealth transfers perpetually upwards; it is the hallucination of efficiency and productivity as human creation is plundered and purpose is stifled. It is the hallucination of environmental progress as LLMs consume water and burn carbon to fuel a future state illusion of text-generation machines producing viable solutions to problems we alone created. It is the supreme hallucination of a marketing tool disguised as human-like intelligence. 

So, as participants in this technology, we have a choice. We can allow it to erode our minds and become hostage to its veneer of intelligence and capability as it echoes the knowledge it has scraped from us and reflects our worst prejudices back on us, and allow it to consume all of our attention and resources like the social media era preceding it.

Or we can refuse to submit to the mandate from the tech billionaire class to obsequiously outsource our minds to this tool. We can choose where and how we adopt the tool to address specific personal or professional requirements, and solve real human problems without fully ceding our critical thinking and creativity.