AI Is Making Everyone Stupid

. . . And There's Still Something We Can Do About It

We are all living in a reality that increasingly looks like the movie Wall-E. If you’ve never seen it before, it’s worth a watch now.

The film came out in 2008, just a year after the first iPhone hit the market. And yet, it seemed to “know” something about the future that is now apparent any time you go out into the world. At least, I hope it’s apparent.

Human beings, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, have outsourced much of their thinking, planning, and living to computers and technology.

We order food online and wait for it to be delivered to our doorsteps. We ask AI to do our writing and emailing for us, unaware of how similar everyone is beginning to sound.

And instead of using all this free time we have, we squander it, zooming around on motorized bicycles and self-driving cars, endlessly staring at screens, consuming whatever is thrust upon us.

We, like the adult-sized babies in Wall-E, are bored. And the only cure for our boredom, it would seem, is more consumption. So we buy more, eat more, go more places, and never really experience any of it.

We do not savor. We do not pause. We do not sit with our thoughts and feelings and breathe. We have forgotten how to be human.

Take a look around, and tell me this isn’t true. Go out into the world and see how many people you encounter who are reading a book. Go to a movie, the beach, a museum and find people who are taking in the whole experience without trying to capture it in a “quick” video or selfie.

This is just the status quo for most of the modern world. We no longer read or reflect. We just consume. It doesn’t matter what—videos, notes, podcast excerpts—it’s all just content, there for us to gorge ourselves on.

Almost every email I see now, every social media post I stumble across, even some of the books I read and work on, carry the tell-tale signs of being touched by AI. Is this a bad thing? I don’t know. But it’s not necessarily a good thing.

And so, I have to wonder, in Wendell Berry fashion, what good are humans? If we’re not thinking, if we’re not cooking and reading and coming up with new ideas about how the world should work, what are we doing? And can we really call it living?

We have forgotten how to think. We pass off other people’s ideas as our own, quoting the last thing that caught our attention while scrolling, without ever really understanding where these ideas came from.

Meanwhile, attention spans wither, anxiety rates rise, and global conflicts continue. We must be careful.

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A few months ago, I was at a music festival with my dad. We were waiting for the main act to take the stage, and I noticed some people around me were watching a baseball game on their phones.

It’s a thing I see more and more of lately, people being entertained while they wait to be entertained. You even see it at amusement parks, standing in line at the store, or at coffee shops. People watching videos on their phones. People listening to influencers as they work out. People watching other people live, all day long.

Neil Postman was right. We are amusing ourselves to death. Our drug of choice is entertainment, and it is a quiet killer.

What will we do if we cannot stand to be bored, even for just a moment? What will we become, and will we like it? The good news, I suppose, is that we have been warned. We have been told over and over what happens to a world where people stop questioning their assumptions.

We know what happens when we stop reading, when we look to someone else to make our hard decisions for us. It seems that we are headed to a kind of intellectual Dark Ages, a time of such staggering technological genius that we may not even know how to use it.

George Orwell warned us what happens next. Ray Bradbury did, too. Even Mike Judge showed us in his prophetic film Idiocracy a future in which we forgot to be critical. None of these visions are pretty.

When will we get the message?

I know this all sounds hopelessly privileged in a world where people are dying in the streets and many are living in so much fear of what could be. But I think Pascal was right: most of the world’s problems are caused by our inability to sit still in a room, all alone.

So what if we tried it? What if we put our phones down and picked up a book, a real book, just for a while, and let our minds wander?

What if you disappeared into another world and re-emerged as someone different—if instead of scrolling for another thirty minutes, you stepped outside and looked up, if you breathed in deep the winter air and smiled at the quiet thrill of being alive?

Well, then, you might really be living. And who knows where that could take you?