Stupid Is as Stupid Does

In the WSJ, Andy Kessler encourages parents to embrace technology.

Don’t ban it. Revamp teaching to leverage ChatGPT rather than block it. Go toe to toe with addictive social media. ChatGPT won’t make us dumb and dumber unless we let it. Instead, adopt and adapt AI to create an anti-dumb “smartogenic” society.

From a June study coming out of MIT Media Lab: using ChatGPT to write essays results in “cognitive debt.”

Or as Andy Kessler puts it, “that’s a fancy way to say that artificial intelligence makes you dumb.”

Brain Rot

Critics of AI and social media, observes Kessler regularly, throw around terms like “continuous partial attention.” Or “brain rot.”

Commenting on a Substack article about our “stupidogenic society,” one observer notes, “Our society has become so smart we truly are stupid.”

A somewhat miffed Kessler reacts: “Ouch. But are we?” 

Machine-Breaking Luddites

This isn’t the first time society has been accused of idiocy. In 2008, The Atlantic wondered, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Who doesn’t remember being admonished by adults to turn off the “idiot box”? There was a time when calculators, “cars, and probably candles and the abacus were considered a menace to society.”

Yet the antitechnology backlash continues to march forward. Starting in the 1990s and into the 2000s, teenage IQ scores started to slow. Who to blame? “PCs “and that darn Internet.”

Kessler reminds readers how fickle IQ scores can be. What? You ate Cocoa Puffs for dinner? And you drank water directly from the kitchen faucet? Stupid is as stupid does.

Critics love to claim that technology enables addiction, anxiety, dopamine hits and doom-scrolling. A Guardian article that asks if we’re living in a golden age of stupidity includes this juicy quote: “It’s only software developers and drug dealers who call people users.” OK, then! Washington University researcher Scott Marek has cast doubt on the dopamine claim. No matter—technology is always to blame.

Correlation Isn’t Causation 

Kim Kardashian, who has 354 million Instagram followers and just failed the California bar exam, recently revealed that scans showed troubling holes of “low activity” in her brain. Will social media be blamed?

“Almost guaranteed,” promises Kessler.

Jonathan Haidt, author of “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” has a plan to save our children:

• Limit smartphones.
• Ban social media before 16.
• More independence and free play.

Haidt might add going back to living in caves, scoffs Kessler.

Kessler reminds readers that there was a time when we fought fire with fire.

Social media is fun and addictive. But the real world and jobs are technology-dependent and getting more so. AI is a productivity powerhouse. Rather than shielding youth from the future, make education as fun and addictive as technology, social media and AI.