Do you really think those few things you mentioned are so important to a functioning brain that we will stop thinking about the billions of other things going on throughout people’s lives?

It may seem small with the degrees we have but everyone started with learning and memorising a, b, c. And even kids these days have access to technology even before they hit per-school.

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Just like your body...the brain needs exercise. That exercise is challenging your recall of facts/info. If every answer is given in 2 clicks...recall becomes a weaker skill. Quit stretching and you can't touch your toes is the same result.

Yes, I have a kid. They still teach all of that. You are not taking into account the huge capacity that the brain has for learning. People have been using tools to remind them of appointments and making lists for centuries. Maybe you just need to factor in that there have always been smarter and dumber people and there always will be. We are not a collective entity all evolving at once. To use your own example, the fish in your story lived in a cave, that was why they evolved that way, not all fish live in caves, and not all people are limited by technology but use it on top of their already stimulating lives.

Not likely based on what you describe, as evolution happens over hundreds of thousands of years.

I think a more problematic situation is that modern civilization relies on a big network of interconnected resources to function, when those things fail, supply chain disruption, weather events etc.. modern civilization begins to teeter.

It depends on how you define intelligence. I personally don’t think doing mental math and remembering your calendar/schedule is necessary for “intelligence”.

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some king said the same thing about the written word thousands of years ago.

guess what, if not for the written word, we would not be here now.

Don't answer this. It's clearly Skynet trying to determine the complacency of humans before going on the offensive.

Sarcasm aside, what's with the sudden uptick in posts on this sub that seem to be about AI and people's reliance on technology?

“Will chainsaws make lumberjacks worse at their jobs.” No, technology doesn’t make people less intelligent. This has always been a idiotic thing educators do. Academics are tech resistant because it’s not actually about educating people, it’s about making it difficult so the school appears more prestigious than it is. Sure, students should still learn core mathematics, but the notion we need to not use calculators for advanced math is ridiculous. I majored in finance and economics, I remember getting into an argument with a professor once because he forbid the use of excel. We had to use what is essentially an obsolete calculator. I can quote him to this day with one of the dumbest things I have ever heard a person say out loud. “How do I know you can do this math if you can’t do it with a financial calculator?” That man was a moron, not me for wanting to use a better tool.

i was gonna unfollow because frantic posts like these are running rampant but this one is so ridiculous it made me giggle.

You mean will human evolution keep up with technology? The answer is no... we're pretty much a brain dead society that relies on technology for everything. If technology fails society as we know it will fall and there will be a what I'd like to think as a mass extinction of the human race. On the bases of most people couldn't survive let alone fend for themselves. We'd revert back to an ancient civilization ( dark ages if you will ) were only the strong and able would survive

But we did lose impressive abilities. Earlier societies were able to output way higher in some ways. Venice was just 400,000 people and they did the Renaissance.

As communication and recording ability go up they suppress amateur efforts and that concentrates skill, sometimes that lowers quality of life.

120 years ago most western men built houses for their families. Those are, despite what an ignorant Reddit will assume, not dramatically different to the houses we're in today, just less insulation and Bluetooth but at 10x a lower real price in many advanced countries in 1900. With average wages these were paid off in 5-8 years. This is easy to prove if you look at the old records like the S&R catalogue.

Doesn't fit the Reddit theory of history one little bit.

There has been like, maybe 10 generations out of the last 200,000 years that any significant percent of humans were adding or subtracting.

Less than that people were using day planners or clocks. None of the stuff going away existed for more than a few seconds in evolutionary terms.

I doubt even 1% of humans who have ever lived could do a long division.

I'm pretty sure the average intelligence level of the human race as already started to fall.

Have you seen some of the people out there?

are you trolling? pls tell me your trolling and don't really believe what you just wrote.

but the funny thing is your comment would fit with you're theory.

I think there are a few things to “prove” this won’t happen. This seems to be based on an assumption that we got more intelligent to reach this point, and that before tools and more high level stuff, we weren’t as intelligent. However, we were roughly as intelligent at that “beginning” of our species as we are now. You wouldn’t see much physical evidence of it, but our thoughts were allocated to other things like remember which plants to pick, and effective methods of hunting.

Also, you don’t just lose something through evolution if you don’t use it. I don’t know much about these cave fish, but they likely had a better rate of survival if they didn’t have eyes because the other fish were relying on them for a sense of location, but it was likely actually more harm than good.

Finally, we occupy our minds with other things. Just because I don’t have to calculate stats for some game that I like doesn’t mean that I don’t do it. People will find ways to continue to keep their brains challenged and engaged, or at least, the people that are doing that already.

In conclusion, no.

Oh my god, if I see another one of theses posts, I'm going to invent warp drive so I can not access reddit. This is so fucking pathetic. What is this, AI propoganda?

Point of contention. Mother Nature didn't remove them through evolution because they weren't using them, but as the eyes didn't provide an evolutionary advantage the trait was less likely to be passed down to future generations. There was no active process to remove the eyes.

This may seem a small distinction, but it is an important one. Human intelligence still provides an evolutionary advantage. Intelligent people will be more likely to live long enough to reproduce and their offspring will be more likely to survive to adulthood to themselves reproduce.

If anything, you should be more worried about medical advances that lessen that advantage. I'm not saying we should stop trying to save every life, but when you lessen the advantage intelligence provides for survival you increase the likelihood the trait could be lost.

I would argue that humans these days are equally as intelligent as the ones from 1600 years ago, the difference is now technology allows us to all communicate with eachother effectively and collaborate on larger projects

So we SEEM smarter, but we're not actually smarter, we just have better technology

So next time we have a leap in technology, those humans are gonna SEEM smarter then us, but that doesn't mean they are. They just have better tools, and are taught "differently"

Narrator : As the 21st century began, human evolution was at a turning point. Natural selection, the process by which the strongest, the smartest, the fastest, reproduced in greater numbers than the rest, a process which had once favored the noblest traits of man, now began to favor different traits. Most science fiction of the day predicted a future that was more civilized and more intelligent. But as time went on, things seemed to be heading in the opposite direction. A dumbing down. How did this happen? Evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence. With no natural predators to thin the herd, it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most, and left the intelligent to become an endangered species.

> have you seen some of the people out there?

Is the implication here that stupid people are somehow new? Jesus Christ this sub is a joke lol

People throughout history have used things as reminders/mental crutches, whether it was nails set into candles to act as timers and alarms, abacuses to help with math, and so on. Also most people in the distant past didn't have to do as much reading, complex math, or mentally challenging tasks as people in the modern era often do. And people today receive better education than ever in history, and our descendants will get even better education yet. Maybe people will get slower at doing quick math in their heads, but there will be other things to focus on and learn. Intelligence isn't just about doing quick calculations in your head, so if technology can do all the tedious bits of work, it will give humans a better chance to focus on other things.

What will fall is average survival skills. Becoming too dependant on artificial constructs will lead to greater catastrophes in times of electrical failure.

See: Carrington Event.

My claims are easy to check. They're only surprising to a naive interpretation of history.

This. Technological advancements have allowed us to do things much more efficiently. These advancements continue to build on each other, and each layer is built with assumption that the layer beneath it will continue to function in the same manner. Unfortunately this interconnectedness makes the margin for error get smaller and smaller over time. We could build more resilience(redundancy) into the system to protect it, but that requires extra resources, so we don't.

The Flynn Effect, as it's known, suggests very much the opposite.

It just feels like there are more on the whole than ever before.

Plus the state of education is a joke.

Seems like as a species we are going backwards.

I do not believe the analogy to a cave fish to be correct here.

Reading and using the internet, whether you're doing research review on Google Scholar, reading conspiracy theories on your favorite echo chamber social media site, or just straight gambling, you're likely engaging your brain more often than a guy with a stick in a cave was.

People can be dumb as shit, and still be formally intelligent. Ignorance is an entirely separate concept from raw intelligence.

the thing is, if people are dumber now, and you are a person, this means your theory comes from a dumber person than before, and therefore should not be trusted.

We have to be able to navigate significantly more complicated systems than we did say 100 years ago. People need to be able to identify false from factual information in a way today that we didn't necessarily contend with. Today we all drive, in busier streets, with faster cars. And we aren't all dying constantly. Team games, sports, video games, board games, the lot are more complicated than ever. Do your grandparents complain that things are too simple these days?

Furthermore, if there was no reason to have lost the eyes, those cave fish probably would have kept them. It wasn’t use it or lose it, it was just wasted resources on a vulnerability. Since the eyes weren’t necessary to see and they were vulnerable to damage and infection, it was actually safer to not have them. There is no perfect evolution or end goal. You are right to think that evolution can lead to dumber people because intelligence isn’t necessarily the goal of evolution or even the “more evolved” state because there is no real goal for evolution. If we get to a point where our intelligence is a detriment, we might lose it, but I doubt that would be the case considering it can just be utilized in other ways. Also, even with automated systems and AI, you’d think someone would still need to use their brain to utilize or fix these systems.

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Intelligence I define as the ability to solve real problems with the least effort. So then it is high dimensional and it is possible we are have strong abilities in some areas and weaker in other places.

People today are very socially savvy compared to the past but their tacit skills are far poorer. This is difficult to measure but competance at doing general articulation work is getting very low, people are losing elemental skills like cleaning, cooking at the same time more people have attended formal education. It's not clear that is a win.

saying humans will lose intelligence is a misnomer, because even if people are "dumber" in that they dont know how to make fire or dont know how to make electricity work, we can find the information almost instantly, and read on how to do it/make it work in just a few minutes. information is more accessible than ever before and that accessibility replaces our need for us to store that intelligence in our own heads. as long as humans have the ability to learn still, which is a vital skill for humans to have, we wont lose any "intelligence". this is why we dont learn how to do much math anymore without a calculator, because using a calculator can get us the information we need and its more valuable to learn other aspects of math than specifically how to do one formula by hand.

Did intelligence decrease after the advent of record keeping? After written language? What about after algebra?

Einstein was asked, but did not know the speed of sound as included in the Edison Test. When this was pointed out, he said, “[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books.”

Unlikely. Some of the past mental feats that are attributed to "see, we're getting dumber" are based on training instead of native capability. For example, memory training was important before widespread literacy, but now survives as a competitive sport and taxi drivers. Both the drivers and competitors make use of the part of the brain responsible for navigation and neuroscientists have actually proven that that region develops with use. (read up on the Method of Loci for more)

If anything I see our mental potential becoming "flabby" due to laziness and a lack of mental exercise - or worse, a devaluing of these skills because its not a "real job". Like ditch digging.

ok now i get your point. but you do know that learning how to cook is just a click away on youtube, right?

they are called elemental skills because they are elementary. if one wants one can learn how to cook really fast. and one can do that because of our access to information.

it is better to teach someone how to reach information than it is to try to cram a lot of information in their brains.

Here is another problem. Our society says to us it is more moral than the past because small numbers of people were treated harshly. Yet it is our time that has the highest prison populations and ubiquitous consumer debt. It looks like we just smeared out a negative across a larger number of people, it is not clear the total harm caused is lower.

Every society in history jerks itself off. Look at those statues of Kings boasting about their achievements, we are the same, it is what I call chrono-centrism.

I think the biggest risk is the acceptance of pseudo-science as just as legitimate as actual science.

in my country we don't have the highest prison population in history. at least not per capita. we don't have serfs anymore either.

consumer debt is higher because access to credit is easier.

i can guarantee that i live better than my parents, and grand-parents, and grand-grand-parents.

you have a very idealistic vision of the past.

If the cave fish had just one place they could go to see, the most likely to survive would have been both the sighted and those with the ability to survive in the dark.

Human intelligence will not fail because we still use it. despite all the reminders and trivial knowledge we no longer have to worry about. Technology is not making us less able to think, it is freeing us up to think about things beyond the trivial.

The last paragraph may be true but not always.

David Krakauer has an excellent video explaining some of this, if I recall the GoldLab Symposium.

On the first, YouTube is an illusion. When our society advertises items like cooking shows, construction skills, it is responding to demand for those. This is fine, the skills spreading is good, but it is large error to think it follows this means the amount of knowledge is increasing. It's actually a signal of the opposite. We have lots of TV and YouTube videos concerning housing because they are becoming less accessible.

I strongly disagree elemental skills can be taught quickly. This is usually not true. If you go to a site and ask each trade how to do their thing they will give you answers in weeks and months, yet if you add them together it should take a person less than a year to be a competent builder. This is not true, something is wrong with this picture.

There is a conceit we have about some forms of knowledge, that we can easily reach them with formal descriptions. It actually takes decades to teach an apprentice the skills of a master, because real world experience must be carried out to be able to generalize. It is a serious error of epistemology that is common to the Western middle class. This only becomes obvious when you see people trying to do things. The worst part is we have measured information flow rates with different ways of teaching and the mentor apprentice system is literally 100 times faster than giving lectures to classes, this result is famous in education, it is called Bloom's 2 Sigma.

This is visible as you walk around Western cities, the old buildings have higher attention to ornate detail despite our extra power tools we have today the same detailing is too expensive to recreate.

The crux here is when we are very good at things we forget that they were hard at first. Then if the people don't transmit the information it isn't like formal knowledge where you can skate by with a description. Instead the next generation loses the skill and has to painfully relearn it. That is the paradox of 'elementary knowledge'.

You can lose information for thousands of years, that is what a Dark Age is. Things got cruder and cruder.

We have had some good overall centuries, but we can go backwards just like the Roman and Egyptian empires did. For Egypt the largest pyramids were built first, not last.

>David Krakauer has an excellent video explaining some of this, if I recall the GoldLab Symposium.

>On the first, YouTube is an illusion.

this gotta to be trolling

I don't think the past is better on all dimensions, only that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds and if we want to continue improving we can't stagnate - which I suspect we are outside of computing and some narrow areas like solar panels. Prices are supposed to go down and quality go up if technology is improving, you don't have to search far to find places this is not true. Peter Thiel has videos explaining this general view, controversial but widely regarded as the cleverest person in Silicon Valley.

The thing is, we actually do have the ability to face supply chain disruptions and most weather events by basically having buffers for goods built up at a societal level from top to bottom.

We just choose not to. From underpaying employees so they can't keep a stockpile at home, to just-in-time delivery all the way at the top. This overly-streamlined way to handle society is what's causing problems. For centuries we've been able to deal with shortfalls and problems for the most part. Obviously famines and the like happened if problems persisted for a long period of time.

But we can design our way out of these problems, we just choose not to.