Comment by jpnc
15 hours ago
If you create a machine for laziness you're going to get lazy people. It's only going to get worse I'm afraid.
Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?
15 hours ago
If you create a machine for laziness you're going to get lazy people. It's only going to get worse I'm afraid.
Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?
Arguably we already have, if you concentrate on intelligence rates since 1975: the reverse Flynn affect. Those who grew up about that time no longer had to generate their own entertainment through storytelling, make their own music, calculate things mentally: everyday they had music, entertainment pumped into their homes, a way to avoid athematic, etc. And now we're evening thinking a lot less in our jobs, not even practicing the skills we learnt. Intelligence is only going to decrease.
Yeah it's as old as time to be honest.
When Plato complains about writing diminishing our faculties for memorizing things, it's sometimes treated as an example of how we've always pointlessly worried about these things, but he was absolutely correct and the transition from an oral culture to a written culture has absolutely demolished those capabilities.
Writing as a technology ended up having strong upsides that mostly made up for that (in particular our ability to communicate across distances and time, to read Plato's concerns without 100 generations of Chinese whispers), but it was a trade-off, as most technologies tend to be.
But displacing individual ability is a feature, not a bug.
How else could mind-virus like philosophy or religion or science or political legitimacy transit highly-variable humans for generations?
Religious organizations, governments, corporations all far outlive their founders and maintainers. Heroes at best only stretch or squeeze the dogma or methodology to grow the organization by better fitting to the culture.
And because organizations accumulate control over resources, individuals can have little effect outside them.
We are disposable by design.
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Honestly curious why you're being downvoted, but I think about this all the time. We always focus on the positives of any new technology and the negatives are either invisible (till later) or glossed over.
Not my idea though, greater minds than I have talked about this a lot: Neil Postman, Lewis Mumford, etc..
It makes me so angry that an entire branch of "science" gets to just take data and go "I dunno man, maybe kids are just dumber". There's so much of this in social science. Take some measurable thing, and then just wildly speculate about the cause of it in an entirely untestable way, and then test that theory in ways that absolutely do not justify the conclusions. At the very least, the whole field should get a lesson in how to communicate the certainty of their theories and conclusions. You've got some guys hanging around couching their uncertainty when they're banging sub atomic particles together at the speed of light and then you've got some social science bro being like "If you move that checkbox on that form to the bottom it'll be way more effective, trust me bro I've hacked how people think".
It’s tempting to use what engineers were 70 years ago vs now as an analogy. From a technical point of view, I was told we would be struggling to solve the maths and physics exercises our grand fathers took as students in college, and they had to deal with additional disciplines that disappeared like industrial design (ie drawing blueprints by hand) or manual calculus. So it is tempting to think that the level of engineers has gone down.
But a modern engineer has computers, math software, can code, has all the knowledge of the internet at their fingertips. With all that assistance I believe modern engineers are way more productive and capable.
> With all that assistance I believe modern engineers are way more productive and capable.
That isn't what was asked. The capabilities of "human + machine" clearly are increasing, but the comments above posit that as a result the average capabilities of "human (sans machine)" may decrease. The relative value of each change is far from clear.
Yeah but unless you plan to take the machine away, isn’t man+machine what matters? If you had to develop everything in assembly (or worse), you probably had a much deeper understanding of computers than a modern developer. But the modern developer can setup in minutes what would have taken weeks. To me that’s the definition of progress.
But pre-LLM developers were bogged down in mountain of boiler plate code and unfamiliar APIs. LLM enable to abstract away a lot of the unnecessary complexity that made developers improductive
And I know fuck all about subsistence farming - something most people's ancestors understood deeply. Different worlds, different requirements.
I disagree that it's necessarily laziness.
I work in the embedded space, and I routinely have to work with technologies I'm initially not familiar with. Internet searches are very hit and miss. So, is "AI". I generally use every tool at my disposal to try to get my foot in the door so I can understand better questions to ask and get the technical information I need to do my job.
I absolutely have no problem with someone replying to my question with a response from Claude. I appreciate them telling me the source, so I can assign an appropriate level of trust in the information.
I didn't expect wall-e to become so close to current reality
The only thing they missed was the invention of ozempic.
Maybe they have it but simply don't use it.
Similar to physical exercise and machines replacing it, I think we're going to see extremes on both ends.
Human evolution does not occur in a vecuum. I suspect there will still be preasure to get smarter (how ever way you define that) because of competition with other humans.
The gap between people who are willing to commit the hours to learn something and those who prefer the path of least resistance is getting bigger.
I’d like to add that for hardware development (in my experience) it’s been non-stop double checking because of hallucinations. To the point where I don’t use it for weeks.
it's already happening. IQ is already stagnating or even going down
What's even more worrying is that I've heared plenty of people defend it as, "Younger generations are just intelligent in different ways compared to older generations."
I'm halfway through my 30's and this downturn started with my generation, halfway through the 80's. I hope I'm missing something, because I still need to see a benefit for lower attention spans, lower comprehensive reading skills and lower critical thinking capabilities.
Halfway through 30's means you were born in the 90's though, but other than that you're right, the advent of the internet, google, and rapid fire short form content has messed with our attention spans; the following generation grew up on the internet and saw the advent of high intensity videos and then short-form mobile-only infinite-stream short-form dashed-words videos.
To add, less articulate and somewhat overtly anti-intellectual. Why even learn something when you can ask the slot machine?
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You should point out then that "border collies are just intelligent in different ways, too"
The benefits are increased productivity, consumer satisfaction, and shareholder profits
IQ is calibrated so that the average IQ is 100. If the average IQ is going down, something has gone very wrong somewhere
IQ is a relative measure not an absolute one. 100 IQ in 2026 can be massively different in absolute terms to 100 IQ in 1956.
If you look at old test papers - the lack of intelligence in modern times is very stark.
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IQ is a measure that tests how well people can do IQ tests, I don't think it's an objective measure at all.
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I wonder why is that, what the point of having a score that you can not compare them without external context (the day of taking exam)
IQ gets manually recalibrated downwards when people get stupider so it's mean 100 by construction.
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I feel like this post unironically proves the point.
i’m not doubting this, but do you know if there are any studies on this already?
https://phys.org/news/2023-03-online-iq-scores-century.html https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2023.101734
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I am the lazy human today, but this one is listing a few references:
https://www.pressenza.com/2025/07/the-decline-of-the-intelli...
All machines are for laziness.
Not exactly. A drawing program could just create a new "blank slate" that substitutes some old skill requirements for new skills. The key point is that SOME machines create a sufficient mass of "blank slate"-like environments for active creativity and others (like AI) only diminish that room for creatvity to flourish. The danger is creating and using machines of the latter type.
This is totally wrong.
Some machines are capability amplifiers.
Other machines are shit puking buck passing time sinks.
I think you are confusing machines with motors. Many machines do things that simply are not possible without. A bicycle, for example, is not at any less work than walking, but it enables you to go faster than you can run. Menually operated sewing machines produce stitches that would be infeasible by hand.
Motorising any of those machines could be considered lazy, though.
> A bicycle, for example, is not at any less work than walking
Of course it is, at equivalent distance.
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But you could still arrive if you walk instead of using the bicycle. And I am sure you can do the same stitches by hand, it just takes forever.
Same with coding agents. I could do it by hand. It just would take much longer. Often so long that it would be impractical.
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> A bicycle, for example, is not at any less work than walking
What? Have you, uh, ridden a bicycle before...?
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What about exercise machines ?
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Not sure about de-evolution (devolution is the word I think), just a change in how people and brains work - but you could already see this happening the past few decades. I can't read a technical book or documentation end to end ever since google results came up with specific answers within seconds.
A technical book can be so relaxing (unless e.g. too highly technical... think quantum mechanics). Imagine 50k words on an interesting tech topic without a context switch!
Some people use it to think less, some people use it to learn more.
I think we're going to see a sort of "intelligence caste" form. People who overuse AI and atrophy their brain's ability to think will be on the bottom, while the inverse of those people will be on top.
This is somewhat good news because it means the end (to some extent) of the Peter Principle. My hope, though, is that this doesn't turn into an actual caste system, but I'm not holding my breath. I think that's where this all goes: we're in the process of the world's intelligence being strip-mined and resold back to the world at a premium. The only ones who "survive" long-term are the ones who refuse to submit all of their mental faculties to AI.
That inevitably leads to a rapid degeneration of the species. Only way to avoid that outcome entirely is to remind people that their brain is valuable and they need to exercise it just like they would the rest of their body.
Heavy LLM users still have to spot bad assumptions and catch errors. Scrolling social media seems like a much better example of mental atrophy.
We're already seeing it.
Human intelligence evolved without technology, so, no.
Only in corporate setting.
Well, apparently, our brain sizes have shrunk something like 30% over the last 10,000 years. This is primarily because ancient man needed to be a jack of all trades just to survive in the wilderness. Once civilization and specialization took over we just didn’t need all that processing power since a lot of that work was just outsourced to civilization and society.
Alcohol has existed for zillions of years, but not literally every person is a useless drunkard.
You could consider it a class of predator on people who have vulnerabilities that can give way to dependence on the LLM and an inability to function. It could be seen in that light. The underlying problem is being described in that light.
> Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?
A de-evolution of culture for the sake of efficiency, sure. The entire culture will shift to a greater degree of superficiality, not just because of the lack of deep understanding of what they're doing, but because AI will condition (and is conditioning) people to want the more superficial stuff.
This isn't a phenomenon exclusive to AI - but AI is at the apex of it and is the worst we've seen so far because it, much more than anything else, targets the mental domain whereas most previous automations have targeted the physical but the mental as well to a lesser extent.
The end result is a huge amount of technical debt that simply can't be recovered and a huge increase in myopia that will prevent us from truly understanding and solving serious problems that will undoubtedly occur.
Most people can't see this because they're already addicted to the dopamine hit of the tech, but it's one reason I'm 100% anti-AI and I hate it with an immense passion.