Do smartphones make people stupid?

To the understandable satisfaction of progressive-minded educationalists, especially those who wanted to believe that almost everything depends on social conditioning and very little on hereditary factors, from about 1930 onwards average IQ test scores kept rising throughout the developed world. This was attributed to better schooling, people having more to eat and the mental agility that was demanded of those who lived in complex industrial societies.

However, 20 or so years ago, what was called the “Flynn effect” – after James Flynn, the New Zealand-based researcher who had done most to attract attention to the phenomenon – suddenly went into reverse. In country after country, test scores started going down. It seemed that for some mysterious reason our modern tech-driven civilisation was turning against the inventive ingenuity and desire to acquire knowledge that had brought it into being.   

Just why this is happening – and there are some who insist that the dispiriting results being recorded tell us more about the intelligence tests themselves than about those taking them – is a matter of dispute. It cannot have anything to do with evolution, which works extremely slowly. For that reason,  many have come up with a more plausible explanation; they blame it on the dumbing down of educational standards by those who believe that exams are discriminatory, competition is evil and that even illiterates should be given academic diplomas because otherwise they would feel neglected. They see it as an inevitable consequence of the ensuing “grade inflation” which, like the economic variety, reduces the value of what is being counted.

Others, and there are more and more of them, suspect that the decline is due to people, especially younger ones, growing accustomed to outsourcing their thinking to electronic devices. After all, many say, why should they bother to learn to do sums when a cheap handheld calculator can do them far faster and more accurately than even the most gifted idiot savant? And why read newspapers, let alone books full of difficult words, when you can get all the information you need served up instantaneously on the screen of your laptop or multipurpose telephone?

For a long time it was taken for granted that headlong technological progress would greatly benefit youngsters by providing them with a cornucopia of educational resources that had been denied to previous generations. That was why in many parts of the world, among them Argentina, politicians decided that every pupil in the nation’s schools should have a computer which would give him or her immediate access to everything deemed to be worth learning. Unfortunately, the results of this experiment have not been at all promising.

Before too long, it became clear that having a computer on every desk was every bit as useless as would be letting schoolchildren loose in a well-stocked library filled with books in foreign languages. In places like Silicon Valley, technological magnates and their friends soon started sending their own kids to schools where teachers applied old-fashioned methods and computers were banned because they distracted students from what they were supposed to be doing. For similar reasons, in many countries those responsible for public education have ordered schools to prevent pupils from having their now ubiquitous “smartphones” within reach. Instead of listening to what world-renowned sages have to say, they use them to chat with their friends and stir up mischief.

In the United States, worried academics often complain that a growing proportion of university students are unable to read, let alone write, with anything approaching fluency, which is why many renowned institutions have had to make available “remedial” programmes for the products of their country’s underachieving educational system that they feel obliged to admit. In Argentina, the situation seems to be even worse. Hardly a day goes by without some distinguished industrialist describing how hard it is for his company to find employees who are able to understand straightforward written instructions or solve laughably simple mathematical problems. Though tens of thousands of jobs are being made available, those capable of filling the vacancies number, at best, in the hundreds. This means that, if Argentina’s economy begins to expand at a rapid trot as President Javier Milei expects, competent workers will have to be imported from abroad even if, at home, unemployment levels remain dangerously high.  

It would be pleasant to assume that, by making it much easier to become well-informed about arcane branches of learning and get acquainted with what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said” in former times, technological innovation will bring about a cultural golden age far surpassing those that took place in ancient Greece, Tang-dynasty China or Renaissance Italy, but this seems to be wishful thinking. Instead, it is encouraging one that is characterised by little more than self-satisfied mediocrity and commercial crassness.

This is unlikely to change; to make the outlook even gloomier, the advent of Artificial Intelligence seems certain to make things a great deal worse.  Rightly or wrongly, those who say they know what is coming our way take it for granted that AI will take charge of an increasing number of tasks that require at least some brainpower and in so doing deprive tens of millions of their jobs and the sense of purpose that goes with them.

These are still early days, but in a couple of minutes AI can already cook up an impressive PhD dissertation that would take an honest aspirant several months or even years to complete. Just how many have been taking advantage of its prowess is anybody’s guess, but the suspicion that some could be is surely making the academic environment even more rancorous and given to backbiting that it was before computerised research tools became available.

If the prophets have it right, before too long AI will also wreak havoc in the arts, beginning with imaginative literature, by making it harder to distinguish between the output of sophisticated machines programmed to hoover up everything in cyberspace and mere humans whose leaders, if current trends are anything to go by, seem to be perfectly willing to let the artefacts clever people put together take over and do all our thinking for us.