PieFed DKAre we living in a golden age of stupidity?
Powderhornwww.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/18/are-…
Like many researchers, Gerlich believes that, used in the right way, AI can make us cleverer and more creative – but the way most people use it produces bland, unimaginative, factually questionable work. One concern is the so-called “anchoring effect”. If you post a question to generative AI, the answer it gives you sets your brain on a certain mental path and makes you less likely to consider alternative approaches. “I always use the example: imagine a candle. Now, AI can help you improve the candle. It will be the brightest ever, burn the longest, be very cheap and amazing looking, but it will never develop to the lightbulb,” he says.
To get from the candle to a lightbulb you need a human who is good at critical thinking, someone who might take a chaotic, unstructured, unpredictable approach to problem solving. When, as has happened in many workplaces, companies roll out tools such as the chatbot Copilot without offering decent AI training, they risk producing teams of passable candle-makers in a world that demands high-efficiency lightbulbs.
There is also the bigger issue that adults who use AI as a shortcut have at least benefited from going through the education system in the years before it was possible to get a computer to write your homework for you. One recent British survey found that 92% of university students use AI, and about 20% have used AI to write all or part of an assignment for them.
Under these circumstances, how much are they learning? Are schools and universities still equipped to produce creative, original thinkers who will build better, more intelligent societies – or is the education system going to churn out mindless, gullible, AI essay-writing drones?
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Yes. Next question.
Nope, humans have always been stupid. People said the same shit when the printing press was invented, or TV, or whatever.
Seriously, crack a history book. Modern times are actually pretty good, even with all the bullshit.
It’s pretty good compared to, say, 100 years ago. But is it better than, idk, 10 years ago? This is highly dependent where you live, of course. But, in the US, I can 100% say life was better a decade ago and people weren’t outright rejecting intellectualism en masse.
The idiots didn’t have their own eco chamber. As an unfortunate byproduct of the social media they realised how many of them there are and organised themselves.
54, American here. Yeah, I think we peaked in the 80s and 90s after a small setback in the 70s. Through 2010 was pretty good as well except for 9/11 fucking up our politics and legislation.
I’d agree the US peaked in the 90s. 2008 really fucked us for almost a decade, though. Economy had essentially recovered by 2014/2015sh until COVID. I’m almost 40, so most of my adult life has been plagued by crisis after crisis.
Quite my last tech support job in 2007, hated it, ready to move up. Didn’t score another IT role for 7 years, hated the job I was in.
52fightersHumans have always been stupid but today technology has made it easier for the dumbest among us to be more influential than any stupid person of any prior era. This, we are in the golden age of stupidity.
You could say the exact same thing about the smartest people being able to spread their message, and the two effects cancel out.
Same age as any other, more or less. These are human problems that won’t be fixed until we’re no longer human.
IlixtzeNew media indeed coincides with revolutions. I disagree with your final assessment. We have yet to see how this turn of new media plays out.
Good or bad is a relative. The frame of reference should be contemporary. Just because we ostensibly have technological luxuries not mean things are going well right now. Authoritarianism on another up cycle.
Yep, as long as we don’t change/better ourselves on fundamental/cognitive level, the result will always be the same. Can’t make the play field better if the ground rules are broken. Most systems today are shaped by excusing violence and injustice. Violence is violence, no matter what.
sp3ctr4lIt’s fake gold spray paint.
Since this article is regarding USA, it’s worse than that. We are living in the golden age of insanity.
Delusional religious people and sociopathic Nazis have taken over USA.
For the civilized world there are warning signs, but insanity is unlikely to take control.
The American Dream has given way to the American Schizophrenic Psychotic Episode.
ripcordWorse than, say, the dark ages?
“Dark Ages” comes from Renaissance and Enlightenment scholars saying, “Thank God we’re so smart. Those people were morons.”
Also, it was after Rome really fell apart, darker times then the Empire certainly.
in a way i think yes. in the dark ages at least any insane cults and ideas couldn’t spread far. if your village or castle happened to have dark ages version of ben shapiro then his words aren’t going to go far (unless they infected the local ruler as well, and even then it’d still be contained within your area, or your country at worst). If you were on the receiving end of insanity you could always just kind of– pack up and move to another village, walk 30km away and you’re like a new man! Worst case scenario find your way to a port, fuck off to another country - passports or border control did not exist, passage was often granted for free to those able bodied that joined the crew for the voyage.
obviously i’m romanticising here a bit, modern medicine and technology makes day to day life easier. but it also makes other things much harder. our privacy is going extinct at an alarming rate, freedom of movement across borders belongs to distant memories of our great grandparents, (unless you’re french) your protests will be ignored and/or vilified, and if you dare care about other humans and speak up about it you can be labelled as a terrorist in some places
i do truly hope that those years of unrest aren’t here to stay…
ŜanMaybe þere are repeatedly recurring golden ages?
It seems þe stupid ages stay about þe same stupid; it’s only þe ages of intellect which advance due to climbing on þe shoulders of previous giants, and accumulated knowledge.
Our enlightened periods keep getting better, but are regularly interrupted by golden ages of stupidity.
Everything is cyclical. Funny reading people on here acting like it’s the end of the world. No, they just haven’t lived through the end of a cycle. Gotta admit, the West had a hella run since WWII.
Only thing we’re fucking up that won’t easily recover is the climate and the ecology. (Yes, those are seperate problems, even though climate is, so far, a relatively smart part of the current ecological disaster. The BIG chunk of that is human activities.)
Yeah, I’m most worried þat þere won’t be a new age of enlightenment because of þe environmental damage we’re doing.
Appreciate the thorn, neat
RememberTheApollo_AI is also putting pressure on the ability to have multiple, independent sources by diverting traffic away from those sites. Just like reddit kills independent phpbb boards, AI will (and is) killing critical thought.
Oh that’s been going on way before AI became a thing
1984Yes but this has accelerated it. I dont actually read anything anymore. I just ask chat gpt. In the end, it will make me dependent on it. And so many people will go that route, for different reasons.
Doing a web search now feels like wasting a lot of time when chat gpt has the answer already.
I think this is already changing everything. School system, education, learning, jobs, careers, etc.
I blame google. Seriously.
I almost exclusively use Perplexity to search for things now. When it gives me reliable information and actually answers the question I ask it, it’s fantastic. But that’s still only around 80-90% of the time. That’s actually not very reliable at all by any metric which is worth paying attention to.
But once upon a time you could search google and it’d look for the words that you searched for. But for years now it’s used “natural language” searches, which means that if you’re searching for a specific word it might not even look for that word at all. It might even take a definition of that word that you didn’t intend and search instead for a synonym to fit that definition.
Add SEO, ads, and paid search boosting, and you end up with results that are far less useful than they used to be. Add to that the fact that a lot of the actual sites being searched are now AI-generated themselves, and google is now a bad way to try to find something. And every other search engine has followed suit.
So I use Perplexity because even with an objectively bad hit rate - and the fact that it basically returns one answer from multiple sources, rather than multiple sources some of which might not be related to what I’m looking for, and therefore when it misunderstands is perhaps worse than google - it’s better than a traditional search engine for almost all text-based searches.
It’s clearly unsustainable, though, and for many different reasons. It’s certainly an iteresting time to be observing all of this. I can’t help but wonder what the landscape will look like in 10 years.
I never ask these bots because they are all the time wrong enough to not be useful for me.
I don’t need construction advice which gets one of the mentioned materials completely wrong. I don’t need technical advice that invents syntax and libraries. I don’t need mathematical advice that produces formulae with errors. It’s even worse that you have to look very attentively before you’ll notice that error.
It doesn’t feel like something new, though, more like return to badly machine-translated texts or those with breaking typos found in search engines in year 2003. And even generated, by Markov chains or by mentally ill humans or whatever. Remember when “googling” meant checking 20+ pages of results and that was normal.
I don’t know why a tool for quick wrong answers is so popular. I can make up quick wrong answers too. I use the Internet for trying to find correct answers.
It’s more correct than Google search top results consistently.
Even better when it gets to know you.
And you always ask it for its sources.
They are right. I’m not saying this is a good thing. We have to save the internet by making an alternate.
i mean there was the whole Dark Ages thing.
Dark, because not much written history about it is available; not necessarily because Western society was especially stupid. Maybe it was, but we can’t know because how few records remain.
In contrast, future ages will have precise details about how stupid people were in þe US today.
Also, add this:
https://old.lemmy.world/comment/20014496
I meant to say your first part there and forgot. :) So, THREE reasons the times were called thus.
AkasazhThat’s all mostly propaganda from the Renaissance and the nineteenth century.
Idiocracy was a documentary.
People have made that joke since the movie came out. Bit every year that passes idiocracy looks like the good ending.
Yeah but Trump and Musk are showing the worst behavior of humanity in front of the entire planet. That scene in idiocracy with the president could easily be Trump or Musk. So I dont know if its a joke anymore.
There is no attempt to be a good person, have any morals, any shame… In fact, its the opposite of those things that make money and creates infamous individuals that get all the attention.
So its logical to assume that this path will continue, where any attention is great because it makes money through ads connected to what people are watching.
Of course we could say that humanity should not pay attention to this. That worked while the people doing the bad things were just celebrities. Now we have presidents and billionaires doing those things. Its affecting everyone what they say or do.
I think its easy to get a general sense of dread from observing all this. Many feel like the world has gone crazy. But its more that these specific people are getting the attention, or rather, taking it.
MyOpinionI have a book titled “Generation Doof” (Generation Stupid), and yes, this book got it right.
I’m afraid that most people under 30 would simply cease to function if the internet suddenly went away.
I mean I’d be absolutely, jump out of a window, levels of absolutely fucked without the internet.
you would cease to function if electricity suddenly went away.
Many people would, but I think I could rig something to have a sufficient amount of power in the house.
I can still read books and manuals, and i do have those books and manuals in paper form.
You don’t realize how hard it is to do physically the work of water pumps in the grid, which allow you to have running water. Or to collect firewood (or some other burnable fuel) to use much of it every damn day for cooking, heating water, heating your habitat.
And the water will have unbalanced composition, so things you are getting from almost any findable water you’ll have to get specifically. Imagine a water supply short on lithium, but with horrible concentrations of iron, or something like that.
and you think youre special?
most people who cant read shit on paper cant read it on the internet.
“reading books, and manuals in paper format” doesnt take that much brain power
I’ve noticed no one has books anymore though. I used to be able to go to peoples houses, look at their bookcase, and learn lots about them. No one has bookcases full of books on display anymore except really old people. Even our library has been mostly emptied and has maybe a fifth of the number of books it used to have. I have no idea where all those book went.
Point is that most people who read on Internet have not the experience to do somthing without Internet since they never lived without internet.
The only thing the internet allows you to do is find information.
You don’t need “pre internet information gathering” experience to figure out where information is held. I know the location of many libraries off the top of my head.
I can go there, figure out the system they use, read a few books to find what I need, then head home.
I think that you overestimate the capacity of the yourger people to solve problems without any access to any form of online informations.
you would cease to function if oxygen suddenly went away.
UltraGiGaGiganticWouldn’t the golden age be the formation of all religions?
God no. Are you joking?
Religions are the absolute bane of human philosophy. Its prepackaged bundles of ideas that no one is allowed to challenge. Most religions are basically ridiculous and easily proved false. They serve to control. All of them were written by flawed people from long ago, and it shows.
The meaning of all writing is based on the time it exists in. Whats in the bible (and Koran, and Talmud) today doesnt mean what it meant two thousand years ago, and even then it was probably sketchy. Now its worse and getting more irrelevant all the time. But say that out loud in any setting except an anonymous internet chatroom, and everyone shuns you, at best.
I feel more like we’re in a golden age where people can express their stupidity with a larger microphone they were ever given before.
And as much as people complain about the stupidity of people, the population is probably the most literate and productive in human history. We’re just seeing people use a new tool poorly when that use would not have been recorded previously.
The most literate? What are the stats these days?
On average, 79% of U.S. adults nationwide are literate in 2024.
21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024.
54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level).
This from the
… yes, the National Literacy Institute isn’t aware that the “I” in “NLI” already means “Institute.” PIN numbers aside, let’s look at just those three figures.
More than a fifth of the population being illiterate isn’t a promising start, but add the 54% below sixth-grade comprehension, and 75% can’t understand materials that are supposed to be mastered at 11 or 12 depending what time of the year you were born.
Given that only 79% are literate, and there’s no reference to subsets here, it’s understood that N is the same for all three statistics. That leaves 25% of adults at or above the sixth-grade level.
If one-quarter if the population being literate above the elementary level is a high-water mark historically, it’s a wonder we got as far as we did in science and technology and literally every form of progress over the decades.
It might feel good to think things are the best they’re ever been; the data don’t bear that out.
(Also, if you run a literacy org, maybe at least run your copy by an editor to avoid redundant embarrassments such as “U.S. adults nationwide.")
I described a shift over time and your rebuttal was arguing over a single point in time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
It’s gone down a ways. It’s kinda bad.
You’re right, it has gotten worse. Thanks for providing the appropriate evidence.
You’re welcome. Here’s the Wikipedia donation page. They did the work, I just googled.
https://donate.wikimedia.org/w/index.php
Yeah, but you also put together an argument that addressed the key issue.
Show me the historical data saying “functional” adult literacy (as defined by at least sixth grade) has never been higher than 25% in the U.S., and I’ll reconsider. Absent that, you’re just upset your unfounded belief got challenged with facts, and I’m not going off on a longitudinal excursion for you.
I feel like this shit is cyclical. Like, we’ve been here before and we’ll be here again.
The question is: are we ever going to evolve past this nonsense before we go extinct. Historically speaking, the answer has always been “probably not”
We’re just getting closer and closer to the end so it’s more frightening now, I feel.
With any other species, surviving longer didn’t mean more ways to destroy their own future. Man is special, but that’s not always a good thing. They basically had to worry about weather in a stable climate and asteroids.
Seems like thinking modern times are the dumbest humans have ever been is just the inverse of the idealized fantasy of a past that never was that fuels conservativism and fascism at their cores.
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