I've taught one of Nicholas Carr's articles about the cognitive offloading problem in my college classes ("Minds Like Sieves", 2011, https://www.roughtype.com/?p=1503) for a long time. It's definitely worth reading, and this was 14 yrs ago--obviously much worse now.
When we know material will always be accessible somewhere else, we quite literally don't pay attention enough to want to store it because we think we don't need to, and we will always just "look it up." But I tell my students this reminds me of when cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham has said that assuming you can just “look up” whatever you need rather than remembering it is like someone handing you a thick Russian novel that is written in the original Russian. You might say, “But I don’t know Russian,” and the person could respond, “Here’s a Russian-English dictionary. Just look up the words.” This is not a very efficient way of reading. Life is much easier if you have a decent amount of background knowledge already stored in your brain.
So, what happens to us when EVERYTHING--all knowledge--is offloaded to a storage device/platform outside of our own brains? That's what we're facing now, and it's why students continue to get less intelligent.
Great piece. I do believe our society has become so smart we truly are stupid. I don’t know of any world leader or society that has made their nation better because of technology. All I have seen is a more fractious society, with everyone screaming that they are right, and nobody knows how to engage in civil discourse, yet none are truly intelligent in any subject matter anymore because they truly do not have a firm foundation in any meaningful subject matter.
There is no golden age to reflect on, however part of being "civilized", is to adapt specific traits in order to progress forward in a meaningful manner. Those mores are now frowned upon as being old fashioned and no longer relevant, but this isn’t true. Young people have not benefited from not learning grace, poise, or the art of conversation and are wracked with anxiety because they don’t know basic maths to count back change when the power goes out. Who knew that basic skills such as baking and changing a tire would become obsolete in our highly structured world, yet these are the very skills we are now paying "experts" to teach our children. We do not have to live in a bygone era, but we shouldn’t forget all the wisdom that came before us.
As for your query about if younger people are still interested in reading and writing, as my youngest is finishing up on her Masters in Comparative Literature, I can assure you it is still very much needed for the younger generation. Interestingly it was technology which allowed her to watch the 1970s movie on "Wuthering Heights", but it was the 200 year old book which she fell in love with. And her friends who study Anthropology and Ancient Classics at university are equally enthralled. Technology is a blessing and a curse. Humans should use it as a tool to aid in our lives, but the encouragement of our leaders to allow Silicon Valley to continue to grow unchecked and allow the populace to become addicted to social media is just plain wrong. I just hope society wakes up and realizes that before it’s too late.
Totally agree. For years this has been my pitch to kids choosing subjects - rather than think about where the subject will get you, think about what the study of it will do to you. I even have a picture of a gym I show them - and make the point that you don’t go to the gym and go on a rowing machine because you need to row fast - you go to develop specific muscles.
I grew up in the 70s, when the controversy was introducing pocket calculators in math class. There, and later in college, I saw plenty of my classmates struggles with basic functions. Not that they couldn't add five plus seven, it was more that there was a delay in response. They couldn't complete simple equations at speed.
I suspect we'll see something similar with writing. People will have a harder time collecting their thoughts and articulating their case without relying upon their AI buddy.
“That’s why I’ve written before that if your goal is to get a task done quickly, you should definitely use technology. If your goal is to develop your skills, you shouldn’t. If you want to travel 26 miles as quickly as possible, drive or get a taxi – just don’t pretend that you’ve run a marathon.”
Fascinating, and depressing overview of cognitive trends. Popular culture and ordinary social interactions still place a high value on verbal fluency and wit, maybe that will place some sort of floor under the evolution of stupidity.
Use it or lose it. And whatever skill you're trying to master, you have to engage with it on a daily basis -- you start to lose it almost immediately without regular practice. There's an old saying among musicians: "If I don't practice for one day, I notice it. If I don't practice for two days, the critics notice it. If I don't practice for three days, the audience notices it."
In the early 2000s, I noted that Stanford Prof of Primatology and Neurobiology Robert Sapolsky talked about the data on depression and looked at the trends society was moving in and apologized for saying the future would be even more depressing, because things were trending toward the “depressogenic.”
Q: How many people who use social media for 4-12 hours a day are jumping around with glee at how great their world is? A: zero.
So: this culture of ease and desperation, fractured, unable-to-articulate-one’s-own-values, continuous partial attention: obesegenic, depressogenic, and stupidogenic.
Quite an indictment, eh?
And yet, I’m reminded of that thing where the older brother takes the hand of the younger brother and does the “why do you keep hittin’ yourself?” bit. We can stop hittin’ ourselves. But we don’t…’cuz…WHY?
1. If technology is a major driver of the IQ decline, would we expect little or no decline in places where tech is less embedded in daily life—say, rural towns in parts of Latin America? Or has smartphone adoption effectively leapfrogged everywhere, making the offload effect universal?
2. On schools as “gymnasia for the mind” (good phrase!), what specific best practices would you recommend? And how might this extend to colleges, where many report declines in cognitive stamina and effort?
This post is amazing. Was what I was trying to get across in my latest post on Substack, but not as clearly as you have. (https://laurenbrownoned.substack.com/p/outsourcing-humanity-and-thought.) In it, I referenced an article that someone in the UK sent me, about cognitive debt & what happens to the brain when we use ChatGPT to write something: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872. You might find it interesting.
Yes to the gymnasia and yes, too, to the High-level Thinking Lab! As you point out, the second demands the first. The challenge for teachers right now is how to keep students away from AI enough that the gymnasia is possible.
I'm going to add a few thoughts to this hugely interesting and engaging thread. In my town, which is a small market town with three state funded schools; two primary and one secondary each rated as good by Ofsted, there's a growing buzz on local social media about opting out of the state system. Judging from the emails this isn't solely coming from middle class professional parents but from a cross section. The repeated mantra is that the current school system isn't catering for their kids. The comments aren't directed at behavioural issues or bullying but squarely on a narrow curriculum which seems to cut no slack for those kids who aren't thriving academically. I'm aware that my observation is anecdotal but it's cropped up time and again on my town's local social media with parents asking for advice on home schooling. And then today's national news media is full of The Secretary of State for Education offering doom and gloom predictions that kids who miss the start of term are more likely to develop chronic absenteeism which sounds like data straight from the institute for the blindingly obvious. Unless the missing students are on holiday or ill it's a pretty reasonable assumption to conclude that either they,or their parents, are voting with their feet. I'd be interested to know if the trend for home education is on the rise. Certainly with a higher percentage of parents working from home it's more of a practical possibility.
I always find your posts insightful thought provoking. Thank you for writing it.
I agree that schools should not deprioritise teaching cognitive skills as a result of an increasing number of cognitive tasks being outsourced to AI, and that schools should aim to be a gymnasium for the mind. The metaphor is a good one because it raises the question of what students are training for?
How do we motivate students to spend effort on learning core skills, when the high status jobs and positions in society that demand them are obsolete? This I see as the main problem we’re facing.
Back in 2018 there were concerns that trainee medical surgeons seemed to be struggling with physical dexterity. In simple terms they couldn't thread a needle or manipulate as needed to close a wound. Surgery students 'losing dexterity to stitch patients' - BBC News https://share.google/tDTuOur7smFel8hu7
Daisy, in case you haven't seen it: the 10 Sep 2025 newsletter email from Andrew Ng has several (dispiriting?) sections that are education-related. (Ng is very much a Who's Who in both AI and in EdTech: he is the founder of Coursera, DeepLearning.AI and Landing.AI, and he chairs Kira Learning.)
I thought of you immediately, because apparently the theme of Coursera's annual conference was "about creating a skills-based approach to education. For individuals who want to improve their job prospects, shifting the emphasis from gaining knowledge to gaining skills can be very helpful..." Yada yada yada.
There's plenty more, including about AI's risks to children, and inevitably that "2-hour" school in Austin called 'Alpha School' (Huxley would be proud), and the declaration that "Primary and secondary education are among the great opportunities for AI". Ng writes that when "students... learn efficiently", it means "freeing up time for social learning and personal development." (Freed-up At Last!, as Dr King didn't say.)
It strikes me that developing the foundations of cognitive architecture to enable one to build on is the most important aspect for schools to focus on.
I've taught one of Nicholas Carr's articles about the cognitive offloading problem in my college classes ("Minds Like Sieves", 2011, https://www.roughtype.com/?p=1503) for a long time. It's definitely worth reading, and this was 14 yrs ago--obviously much worse now.
When we know material will always be accessible somewhere else, we quite literally don't pay attention enough to want to store it because we think we don't need to, and we will always just "look it up." But I tell my students this reminds me of when cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham has said that assuming you can just “look up” whatever you need rather than remembering it is like someone handing you a thick Russian novel that is written in the original Russian. You might say, “But I don’t know Russian,” and the person could respond, “Here’s a Russian-English dictionary. Just look up the words.” This is not a very efficient way of reading. Life is much easier if you have a decent amount of background knowledge already stored in your brain.
So, what happens to us when EVERYTHING--all knowledge--is offloaded to a storage device/platform outside of our own brains? That's what we're facing now, and it's why students continue to get less intelligent.
Nice article.
Great piece. I do believe our society has become so smart we truly are stupid. I don’t know of any world leader or society that has made their nation better because of technology. All I have seen is a more fractious society, with everyone screaming that they are right, and nobody knows how to engage in civil discourse, yet none are truly intelligent in any subject matter anymore because they truly do not have a firm foundation in any meaningful subject matter.
There is no golden age to reflect on, however part of being "civilized", is to adapt specific traits in order to progress forward in a meaningful manner. Those mores are now frowned upon as being old fashioned and no longer relevant, but this isn’t true. Young people have not benefited from not learning grace, poise, or the art of conversation and are wracked with anxiety because they don’t know basic maths to count back change when the power goes out. Who knew that basic skills such as baking and changing a tire would become obsolete in our highly structured world, yet these are the very skills we are now paying "experts" to teach our children. We do not have to live in a bygone era, but we shouldn’t forget all the wisdom that came before us.
As for your query about if younger people are still interested in reading and writing, as my youngest is finishing up on her Masters in Comparative Literature, I can assure you it is still very much needed for the younger generation. Interestingly it was technology which allowed her to watch the 1970s movie on "Wuthering Heights", but it was the 200 year old book which she fell in love with. And her friends who study Anthropology and Ancient Classics at university are equally enthralled. Technology is a blessing and a curse. Humans should use it as a tool to aid in our lives, but the encouragement of our leaders to allow Silicon Valley to continue to grow unchecked and allow the populace to become addicted to social media is just plain wrong. I just hope society wakes up and realizes that before it’s too late.
Totally agree. For years this has been my pitch to kids choosing subjects - rather than think about where the subject will get you, think about what the study of it will do to you. I even have a picture of a gym I show them - and make the point that you don’t go to the gym and go on a rowing machine because you need to row fast - you go to develop specific muscles.
Great comment.
I grew up in the 70s, when the controversy was introducing pocket calculators in math class. There, and later in college, I saw plenty of my classmates struggles with basic functions. Not that they couldn't add five plus seven, it was more that there was a delay in response. They couldn't complete simple equations at speed.
I suspect we'll see something similar with writing. People will have a harder time collecting their thoughts and articulating their case without relying upon their AI buddy.
I love this:
“That’s why I’ve written before that if your goal is to get a task done quickly, you should definitely use technology. If your goal is to develop your skills, you shouldn’t. If you want to travel 26 miles as quickly as possible, drive or get a taxi – just don’t pretend that you’ve run a marathon.”
Fascinating, and depressing overview of cognitive trends. Popular culture and ordinary social interactions still place a high value on verbal fluency and wit, maybe that will place some sort of floor under the evolution of stupidity.
Preach, Daisy!! 🔥🔥🔥🔥
Use it or lose it. And whatever skill you're trying to master, you have to engage with it on a daily basis -- you start to lose it almost immediately without regular practice. There's an old saying among musicians: "If I don't practice for one day, I notice it. If I don't practice for two days, the critics notice it. If I don't practice for three days, the audience notices it."
Really enjoyed this. That comparison between obesogenic and stupidogenic societies ... that's going to stick with me for a while!
In the early 2000s, I noted that Stanford Prof of Primatology and Neurobiology Robert Sapolsky talked about the data on depression and looked at the trends society was moving in and apologized for saying the future would be even more depressing, because things were trending toward the “depressogenic.”
Q: How many people who use social media for 4-12 hours a day are jumping around with glee at how great their world is? A: zero.
So: this culture of ease and desperation, fractured, unable-to-articulate-one’s-own-values, continuous partial attention: obesegenic, depressogenic, and stupidogenic.
Quite an indictment, eh?
And yet, I’m reminded of that thing where the older brother takes the hand of the younger brother and does the “why do you keep hittin’ yourself?” bit. We can stop hittin’ ourselves. But we don’t…’cuz…WHY?
Wonderful piece—I’ve been sharing it widely.
Two brief questions:
1. If technology is a major driver of the IQ decline, would we expect little or no decline in places where tech is less embedded in daily life—say, rural towns in parts of Latin America? Or has smartphone adoption effectively leapfrogged everywhere, making the offload effect universal?
2. On schools as “gymnasia for the mind” (good phrase!), what specific best practices would you recommend? And how might this extend to colleges, where many report declines in cognitive stamina and effort?
Thanks so much for this.
This post is amazing. Was what I was trying to get across in my latest post on Substack, but not as clearly as you have. (https://laurenbrownoned.substack.com/p/outsourcing-humanity-and-thought.) In it, I referenced an article that someone in the UK sent me, about cognitive debt & what happens to the brain when we use ChatGPT to write something: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.08872. You might find it interesting.
PS. I love your work (7 myths!!!)
Yes to the gymnasia and yes, too, to the High-level Thinking Lab! As you point out, the second demands the first. The challenge for teachers right now is how to keep students away from AI enough that the gymnasia is possible.
I'm going to add a few thoughts to this hugely interesting and engaging thread. In my town, which is a small market town with three state funded schools; two primary and one secondary each rated as good by Ofsted, there's a growing buzz on local social media about opting out of the state system. Judging from the emails this isn't solely coming from middle class professional parents but from a cross section. The repeated mantra is that the current school system isn't catering for their kids. The comments aren't directed at behavioural issues or bullying but squarely on a narrow curriculum which seems to cut no slack for those kids who aren't thriving academically. I'm aware that my observation is anecdotal but it's cropped up time and again on my town's local social media with parents asking for advice on home schooling. And then today's national news media is full of The Secretary of State for Education offering doom and gloom predictions that kids who miss the start of term are more likely to develop chronic absenteeism which sounds like data straight from the institute for the blindingly obvious. Unless the missing students are on holiday or ill it's a pretty reasonable assumption to conclude that either they,or their parents, are voting with their feet. I'd be interested to know if the trend for home education is on the rise. Certainly with a higher percentage of parents working from home it's more of a practical possibility.
I always find your posts insightful thought provoking. Thank you for writing it.
I agree that schools should not deprioritise teaching cognitive skills as a result of an increasing number of cognitive tasks being outsourced to AI, and that schools should aim to be a gymnasium for the mind. The metaphor is a good one because it raises the question of what students are training for?
How do we motivate students to spend effort on learning core skills, when the high status jobs and positions in society that demand them are obsolete? This I see as the main problem we’re facing.
I think we have to explain that the core skills are the foundation for the high status ones. But it's a hard sell, I agree.
Back in 2018 there were concerns that trainee medical surgeons seemed to be struggling with physical dexterity. In simple terms they couldn't thread a needle or manipulate as needed to close a wound. Surgery students 'losing dexterity to stitch patients' - BBC News https://share.google/tDTuOur7smFel8hu7
Daisy, in case you haven't seen it: the 10 Sep 2025 newsletter email from Andrew Ng has several (dispiriting?) sections that are education-related. (Ng is very much a Who's Who in both AI and in EdTech: he is the founder of Coursera, DeepLearning.AI and Landing.AI, and he chairs Kira Learning.)
I thought of you immediately, because apparently the theme of Coursera's annual conference was "about creating a skills-based approach to education. For individuals who want to improve their job prospects, shifting the emphasis from gaining knowledge to gaining skills can be very helpful..." Yada yada yada.
There's plenty more, including about AI's risks to children, and inevitably that "2-hour" school in Austin called 'Alpha School' (Huxley would be proud), and the declaration that "Primary and secondary education are among the great opportunities for AI". Ng writes that when "students... learn efficiently", it means "freeing up time for social learning and personal development." (Freed-up At Last!, as Dr King didn't say.)
See https://info.deeplearning.ai/stronger-chatbot-guardrails-weaker-google-monopoly-ai-assisted-education-10-million-tokens-of-context-2
It strikes me that developing the foundations of cognitive architecture to enable one to build on is the most important aspect for schools to focus on.
I love the metaphor of schools as gymnasia for the mind. Nice one Daisy 👍👏