Is technology lowering the world’s IQ?

Those who know me know that I am a technology enthusiast. I am fascinated by the new possibilities that digital brings not only to education, which is my field, but to society as a whole. Since the beginning of this century we have seen more and more innovations, transformations and re-evaluations of our lives happening almost on a daily basis. And we have taken advantage of it a lot.

Just think how easy it is for us to do anything. All the titles that I will indicate in the text below can be purchased from Amazon or other online bookstore. You can watch a movie without having to go to a video store, let alone the cinema. An Uber can charge you up to half the price of a cab — as well as being more efficient and safer. Moving on to education, in the near future, the option to be educated at home, in front of a computer screen, may be as viable as the classroom. Not to mention the option of reinforcing education with 24-hour education channels, and with augmented or virtual reality gadgets. And while this future is not yet here, there is no shortage of companies investing in learning technologies.

But although I am also passionate about technology, I am also passionate about reality. And reality can often be explained by numbers. And looking at the recent numbers I ask myself: Is all this just benefit, with no price tag? Will technology charge us nothing?

I want to reflect on this question with you. Because it is a question that deserves to be reflected upon, and I believe that, despite many articles already raising warning signs out there, in Brazil, we still seem to be asleep. This questioning began, out there, in the last 20 years — and the tone is always one of great consternation.

Writing in the mid-1990s, intellectual and social scientist Kirkpatrick Sale wrote that the path of the “electronic superhighway” was likely to formulate one of the greatest revolutions in human history: such an undertaking “would connect virtually every aspect of American daily life, from watching movies to scientific research, from classroom education to medical diagnosis, from grocery shopping to banking institutions. However, in a computerized, hyper-stimulating, and immediate world ruled by technology, many transformations could happen — and indeed have happened. So much so, says psychology professor Robin Morris of Kings College London, that we need to recognize that expressions of intellectuality in the post-technological world are markedly different.

But what exactly are we talking about when we emphasize these transformations and differences?

The rise of intelligence and the decline of IQ

In these 20 years I just mentioned, we have seen the emergence of broadband internet, iPods that could contain up to 25,000 songs (that was back when people used iPods; today Spotify can offer the entire discography of human history for $20), ultra-realistic video games, endless options for hyper-stimulating entertainment.

However, these same 20 years have brought us some disturbing figures: according to a French research, IQ tests performed on individuals born after 1975 register a drop of five points with each generation. A similar phenomenon is found in England, which led researcher James Flynn to say that “there seems to be a screw loose in young Englishmen. Denmark and Norway follow the same trend, as do Finland and the Netherlands.

Finally, the most striking statistic of all, to me, is the one released by the BBC late last year: the so-called “digital generation” — that is, the generation of digital “natives” — is the one that will, for the first time, have an IQ lower than that of their parents. Concerned about this issue, French neuroscientist Michel Desmurget recently released the book La Fabrique du crétin digital (The factory of the digital idiot). According to Desmurget, whose book won a special prize at the Prix Femina, one of the most important literary awards in France, among the many reasons for the outrageous drop in IQ among contemporary youth is the “overstimulation of attention, leading to concentration disorders, learning and impulsiveness.

According to the author, “even if a child’s screen time is not the only culprit, it has a significant effect on their IQ.” To them, the data is indisputable.

An inevitable fate?

The centrality of technology as the challenges it poses make me reflect on the words of Yuval Harari, author of the best seller Sapiens: technology is humanity’s greatest challenge. Because if today we are seeing that a good part of the functioning of our lives depends on technology (going so far as to call into question the intelligence of the very young), what will happen tomorrow, when artificial intelligence will have reached a point where it not only reveals our thinking patterns, predicting them, but can also take our place in the task of thinking?”

For him, this is perfectly possible. As the author argues in his book XXI Lessons for the 21st Century, if the choices we make are the result of “billions of neurons calculating probabilities in a nanosecond, so-called ‘human intuition’ is nothing but ‘pattern recognition’.” So why couldn’t the machine render us within its paradigms? Technology is already in that process. And bit by bit.

Perhaps it is the case that we are still on our honeymoon with technology. In this case, we need to stop and think twice. For it is not only on the intelligence of the young that it can play a negative role: it can have detrimental effects on the functioning of society as a whole — especially in its sudden absence, as the blackouts in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1998 showed. Lasting a month, this blackout initiated an economic and police crisis that took the country three months to resolve. The entire economy of the nation was in the hands of the machine.

And here comes the question: who owns the machine — us, or the machine itself?