Is Technology Making Us Smarter Or Dumber?
I’ve heard this come up in conversation before and it appears to be a topic that people have either discussed or debated at some point, and recently, I had this debate with someone.
It’s an interesting conversation that seems to divide opinion. I decided to ask people on my personal Instagram account @kyri.paleologos and it was a pretty even split. Some thought it was making us dumber claiming people are getting ‘lazier’ and don’t seem to be using it effectively. While others believed that it makes us smarter because we can now access information so quickly, but it’s up to the individual to use it efficiently.
Regardless of your opinion, technology really does seem to be taking over. In 2015, The Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) released a paper titled Australia’s Future Workforce and reported that 40 percent of Australian jobs (5 million) that exist today, have a moderate to high likelihood of disappearing in the next 10 to 15 years, due to technological advancements. Most of these job losses will largely be from some form of computerisation and automation.
We are increasingly reliant on technology and computers in almost everything we do. In 2020, Bankmycell reported that the number of people that own a smartphone is 4.78 Billion, making up 61.51% of the world’s population. You can check out the full breakdown here. Since its inception, there is no disputing that the internet and the smartphone have been extremely powerful tools for humanity. Both have given us the capacity to communicate and connect with people on a mass scale providing us with infinite opportunities to learn, grow, innovate and adopt new ways of thinking from various cultures, around the world. On the Joe Rogan Experience #1169, Elon Musk believes that humans are vastly smarter with technology and that we already are ‘extensions of cyborgs.’ If you haven't watched that episode… go watch it!
He [Musk] goes on to explain:
how much smarter are you with a phone or computer than without? You’re vastly smarter actually. If you’re connected to the internet you can answer any question pretty much instantly. Any calculation. Your phone’s memory is essentially perfect. You can remember flawlessly. Your phone can remember videos and pictures. Everything perfectly. Your phone is already an extension of you. You’re already a cyborg. Most people don’t realise they’re already a cyborg. That phone is an extension of yourself.
Ray Dalio, billionaire investor and manager of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world, has published on his LinkedIn chapters for his upcoming book titled ‘Changing World Order’. Titled on LinkedIn, Chapter 1: Big Picture in a Tiny Nutshell, he explains that mostly everything, over long periods of time, evolve because we learn to do things better, which raises our productivity. This is shown in the diagram below as global real GDP per capita.
Over the last 500 years, output per person appears to be steadily improving. However, around the 19th century, productivity grew significantly, and according to Dalio, this is because of improvements in broad learning, helped especially from the invention of the printing press. He writes that the steep incline in the 19th century, is the result of:
improvements in broad learning and the conversion of that learning into productivity. That was brought about by a number of factors going as far back as the invention of the printing press in Europe in the mid-15th century (it had been used in China substantially earlier), which increased the knowledge and education available to many more people, contributing to the European Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the first Industrial Revolution in Britain.
Technology, especially in regards to smartphones and the internet, have given many more people the opportunity to access broad learning and increase their knowledge and education on an even more vast scale not seen before.
Perhaps because people are not attempting to educate themselves on how to think and write critically and are instead using the internet ineffectively, some to google stuff like this lol… maybe this is why we see some people take a more critical and pessimistic opinion towards technology.
Jokes aside, nowadays, we have affordable online educational courses built on websites such as Teachable, Udemy and Coursera with an infinite amount of topics. Recently, prestigious Yale University even released a free course titled the ‘Science of Well-Being’ . It has become one of the their most enrolled courses of all time.
I think the greater question is how well is the individual using technology and what are they choosing to use it for? You have the choice to either use it as a tool or allow it to become an obstacle, another topic I write about here. The reality is, in the last 20 years, technology has given us companies like Amazon, Uber, Ubereats, Shazam, Spotify, Facebook, Google, Youtube and thousands more, that has enriched our lives.
Its up to you to find credible sources, not let your ego confuse wanting to be right with the truth, and teach yourself how to sort useful information from useless information by stress-testing your opinion with educated experts.
Let me know in the comment section if you think technology is making us smarter or dumber or perhaps we’re too reliant on it.
