I was listening to a podcast the other day—Stephen Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO—hosting one of the foundational father figures of the AI movement. The conversation took a turn that was both fascinating and deeply unsettling. He suggested that, as a species, we are currently getting a measurable percentage dumber every single day.
Why? Because the sheer pace of technical development and the encroaching shadow of the Singularity are essentially offloading the heavy lifting of human existence. It made me pause. If technology is doing everything—the physical, the mental, the creative—where does that leave the general intelligence of the species?
It’s a “Dumb and Dumber” trajectory that conjures up some pretty vivid, and frankly terrifying, imagery. Remember the animated movie Wall-E? Those future humans living on the orbital ship, bone-density depleted, floating around in chairs, eyes glued to screens while robots catered to every whim? At the time, we laughed at the satire. Now, looking at the trajectory of AI and automation, I’m starting to wonder if Pixar wasn’t making a movie, but a documentary.
We are entering a phase where the “can-do” mindset is being replaced by the “let the bot do” mindset. From navigating our cities to drafting our emails and managing our businesses, we are subcontracting our cognition. When you stop using a muscle, it atrophies. The same goes for the brain. If we aren’t solving problems, aren’t we just becoming passive consumers of an algorithmically curated reality?
At what point do we decide to be far more intentional about the future of our species? Are we content to slide into a high-tech state of perpetual adolescence, or do we want to remain the protagonists of our own story? We talk about the competitive advantage of technology, but the ultimate competitive advantage is, and always has been, human intelligence and ingenuity.
If we outsource that, we aren’t just becoming efficient; we’re becoming redundant. We need to be intensive about how we engage with these tools. Use them to amplify, not replace. Otherwise, we’re just building a very expensive, very fast highway to the Wall-E chairs.
Life is so tech. But maybe it’s time we got a bit more intentional about staying human.
Mark Fancourt
