También podés leer la versión en castellano.
If any of you have been around Substack long enough, I'm sure you've come across a post or two on the topic. If not, you've seen it on Medium, X, or LinkedIn. If those aren’t your rage platforms of choice, then YouTube or TikTok may have been your source. For the old-school ones out there, the evening news, talk radio, or the papers probably brought you the scoop. The buzz around town is that technology, in particular generative chatbots like ChatGPT, is making us stupider.
Disclaimer: I want to say that whatever comes after this paragraph is not an excuse for my behavior—childish and immature—throughout these events. I'm not going to go into the details because this blog isn’t about me. I’m just bringing this up because, as an adult, I want to take responsibility for my actions.
I woke up Saturday morning, and before I could open my eyes, I felt the moisture that had built up on my T-shirt. It's going to be another in a long succession of hot summer days. I looked at my phone, and it was 8:00 AM. I felt a sense of accomplishment: I had managed to sleep after 6 in the morning. That's the time I struggle to wake up during the week when my alarm goes off. For some reason, it’s also the time I wake up without the help of my alarm during the weekend, when I can sleep in. I can't get an extra minute of shut-eye even if my life depended on it, so those two extra hours were a small victory worth celebrating.
As usual when I wake up, I disabled airplane mode on my phone. It sounds easy, but it's a process. Every morning, even though my phone’s Wi-Fi was on when I enabled airplane mode before going to bed, the Wi-Fi’s inexplicably off. That’s not so bad. I can disable airplane mode and turn on Wi-Fi. The Wi-Fi icon goes blue; it's on. But it isn't. If I refresh the menu, Wi-Fi’s disabled. Again. So I turn it on. Again. Most of you would think that it was just a glitch. But once you run out of your monthly carrier data a week into the month, three months in a row because your Wi-Fi was off all day, you start to doubt. I check. Again. the Wi-Fi is off. Again. This dance continues 5 or 6 more times until finally I can see data coming in from my apartment’s internet connection instead of from my carrier. It's a bit annoying, but it happens every morning, so I've gotten used to it.
It's the weekend, which means my partner and I don't have to rush to work in the morning. We made pancakes, chopped fruit, brewed some coffee, and enjoyed breakfast on the balcony while we chatted away.
Feeling guilty because I had ingested more maple syrup than recommended, I decided to get a bit of calisthenics in. So we tidied up, and I went to my workout room. I enjoy my workouts. It's me time, and it gives me the chance to stare at myself in the mirror while I'm flexing with nothing on but my underpants. It’s quite the sight. Sort of like an eclipse; if you stare too long, it can leave you blinded and scared for life.
I always catch a podcast during my workouts, and I wanted to pick up where I had left a Hardcore History episode I was listening to a couple of days earlier. I opened my podcast application of choice, and when I found the episode, the app had lost track of where I had stopped listening before. That used to not happen, but now, on random occasions, it does. The first time I got pissed off, but after the fifth or sixth time, I started writing down the hour and minute I left off so I could get back to that spot next time. I opened my notes app, found the time, slid the progress bar to that point, and started to warm up.
I finished my workout, stretched for a while—that’s no longer optional—and headed toward the shower. There were 15 minutes left in the podcast. I was four hours in on the fifth episode of a six-parter about the Second World War’s Pacific theater. As you can imagine, nail-biting stuff I couldn’t leave for later. I decided to carry on listening in the bathroom. My muscles don't follow my commands after a workout, and I tripped on my way to the shower. I lost grip of my phone, but I managed to catch it before it hit the ground, inadvertently pressing a button on the screen. I don't know what I pressed, but when I looked at the phone, I could see a media player had opened up. Without giving it much thought, I closed it, put the phone to the side, and ducked under the running water.
After showering, I took a breather on the couch. I was scrolling through my email and saw something come in from Amazon. It turned out that when I caught my phone midair, I had accidentally accepted to sign up for their music streaming service: first month free, $10.99 deducted from my credit card after that. I wasn't happy, and I wanted to unsubscribe immediately. I went to the obvious place to do that, the streaming app. But in the app, they told me to go to Amazon.com and unsubscribe there. I found my way through the thousand options on my profile and hit the unsubscribe button. The infinite spinner that displayed the next five minutes made me suspect things hadn't gone my way. So I went through the process again until I got confirmation that Jeff wasn’t going to send the boys around next month to collect.
My earlier forecast was correct, and it turned out to be a hot one. My apartment doesn't have AC, so we decided to catch a movie to enjoy a climate controlled environment for a couple of hours. My partner and I are club members at the neighborhood theater. It's an overpriced membership fee for underwhelming benefits. But hey, you've gotta support local. Their website is as user-friendly as your average office printer. Finally, After my third attempt, I managed to book my tickets, but something went wrong and I paid full price instead of getting the club discount. My partner, who is more reasonable than I am, told me not to get so upset and that she'd sort it out when we got to the theater.
When we got there, I joined the queue to make sure we could get a good spot, and she went to the box office with all the papers: ID, membership cards, credit card, and tickets—I've signed up for mortgages with less documentation. They understood the situation, refunded the tickets, and gave us new discounted ones right before the theater doors opened and people started walking in and getting their seats.
We reached the usher, and my partner gave him her ticket. He scanned it and let her in. I wasn't so lucky. When he scanned mine, the system alerted him that the ticket was void. He told me to step aside and continued letting everyone behind me in. As I saw all the best seats slipping through my fingers with each ticket he scanned, I entered huffing and puffing mode—it sounds more innocent than it actually is.
Fortunately, the person at the till who had handled our situation came up to the usher and explained what had happened with our tickets. I thought that’d resolve the situation and that the usher would let us in. But he saw red on the screen over and over again when he scanned my ticket and wasn't willing to budge. What ensued was a long argument for and against letting potential fraudsters, with fake credentials and tickets, into the five o'clock show. Finally, once he had scanned the last person's ticket, in a moment of pity, he decided to let me in.
So, is technology making us stupider? Were we smart to begin with? Back when the radio came out in the early twentieth century, newspapers complained about how it lowered the intellectual value of information. After that came TV, literally nicknamed the idiot box. After TV, video games that would rot children's brains made their appearance. The most recent iteration in this process is the internet, the largest and most addictive repository of porn and pictures of what people had for brunch in the history of mankind. If technology is making us stupid, it's a process that was already well on its way before AI came around.
We can't even agree on what it means to be intelligent, so figuring out if we are getting stupider doesn't seem possible. But if you've read this far, some things should already be clear. If technology isn't making us stupider, it is having an impact on our lives. For example, the micro-frustrations of dealing with applications that are developed by underpaid and overworked coders, who are pushed to ship faulty products that haven't been properly tested so someone on the top floor can cash in their bonus. Furthermore, the phishing schemes, the rampant credit card fraud, the “free” subscriptions, and the ubiquitous online service fees have helplessly launched us into an impenetrable swamp of grifters, con artists, and corporate swindlers.
But this is just scratching the surface. The most troublesome aspect of our relationship to technology is our dogmatic dependency. We can see this, for example, when the usher refused to let us in, even though his colleague from the till explained that we had indeed paid for our tickets, just because the computer said “no.” This happens every time we visit a foreign city and don't go for dinner at the restaurant a local resident recommends because it doesn't have a five-star review. It occurs whenever we turn left—when we know we should have turned right—only because the navigation system told us to.
What seems to be happening is that technology is leading us to lose faith in our ability to make our own decisions. Even worse, the autonomous “artificial intelligence” that is deciding for us renders the people who do make decisions unaccountable for them. Does that mean we’re stupider? Maybe.
For more on AI and technology by Writer by Technicality, see:
Without reading the article, it’s a resounding “yes” - all you have to do is look around you to see it.
With all the information we have available now, we are simultaneously becoming less informed and more easy to manipulate, despite literally a million things in the digital ether telling you that’s what’s happening.