Are We Creating Morons?

“Moore’s Law means that

more and more things can be

done practically for free.

If it only weren’t for those

who still want to get paid...”

— Jaron Lanier

When in doubt, blame those who are not around anymore to defend themselves. It happened to the Jews in the 14th Century, when they were accused of poisoning wells and causing the Black Death. It happened to John Lennon’s wife Yoko Ono in 1970, when she was blamed for breaking up ‘The Beatles’. It happened to Gaëtan Dugas in the 1980s, when he was identified as ‘Patient Zero’ and blamed for the AIDS epidemic in the United States. It happened to Grigori Rasputin, when he was aligned with the Romanovs and blamed for the Russian Empire’s misfortune. Closer home, it has happened to former politicians for decisions they took decades back in ‘national disinterest’. And it is happening in the tragic case of the Air-India Dreamliner takeoff-crash. Blaming those who cannot respond is a safe bet.

Having thus learnt from Illuminati present and former, I blame Intel co-founder Gordon Moore for his prediction of 1965, when he said “the number of transistors on a microchip will double every two years, exponentially increasing computational power”. His forecast—Moore’s Law—has come true and ushered in a modern digital age, transforming our world from paper records and analog clocks to facial recognition, self-driving cars and Artificial Intelligence (AI) capable of writing essays, composing music and diagnosing disease. Mankind has ridden this wave, creating tools to help it think, create, procreate and navigate. All because of Moore, machines are smarter, faster and intuitive. Also because of Moore, we face a burning question: Are humans getting dumber?

Face it. Today’s generation is growing up in a world where technology is not just a supplement, but a substitute for effort, memory and learning. Ask teens to solve math problems and they reach for a calculator. Ask for a short story and they ring up ChatGPT interfaces. This dependency extends beyond academics, its extrapolation alarming… Technology promised us liberation, but what we are witnessing is subtle yet catastrophic mental regression, especially among the young.

Outsourcing Intellect

Technology was meant to empower us, removing the drudgery of repetitive labour and giving creativity the wings to fly and flourish. But the pendulum has swung alarmingly. We live in an era of intellectual outsourcing, with human thought often replaced by Artificial Intelligence. Look at the chilling instances below, which underscore the visible consequences in schools and universities worldwide. Students are relying on apps for the most basic of tasks, and their justification is startling: “Why should we struggle with thought when machines easily provide all the answers?”

Look at some new-age truths:

· In the US, studies show a surge in anxiety and depression among teenagers, correlated with increased screen-time and decreased real-world engagement. Teachers said over 70 per cent of their students were submitting AI-generated essays;

· In Mumbai, students not only used AI to finish their homework, but also needed it in school the next day to explain what they had written and why;

· In Canada, a 9-year-old addicted to video games suffered tremors and panic attacks when his tablet was confiscated, symptoms generally associated with addiction and withdrawal;

· In Japan, the hikikomori crisis—youth isolating themselves, surviving on virtual relationships—betrays a deeper loss. They are losing not just productivity, but purpose and real-world human connections as well, relying solely on online interactions; &

· In Columbia University, the term ‘Google Effect’ was coined by Betsy Sparrow. It showed that many were less likely to remember information they knew would be accessible online. The knowledge wasn’t gone; it was simply never stored.

Till the 1990s, children spent hours outside their homes, playing games and solving life’s problems on the fly. Today’s pre-teens stare into screens for hours, engrossed in algorithm-curated entertainment. The digital world provides instant gratification by flooding the brain with dopamine, literally rewiring how children interact with reality.

Danger of Over-Convenience

A neuroscientist at Stanford University, Dr Anna Lembke says high-dopamine environments created by video games and AI-powered apps make children seek constant stimulation, a “recalibrating of the brain’s reward system”. In the longer run, children and adolescents are left struggling with boredom, low tolerance to frustration and an inability to focus. At the neurological level, technology doesn’t just change what we think; it changes how we think. Social media, streaming platforms and mobile games are programmed to flood our brains with dopamine, a chemical that leads to happiness. The result is a youth raised on gratification, where boredom is intolerable, patience is rare and focus near-extinct.

AI is not a passive tool. It is an architect of dependency. Apps are ‘trained’ to learn your habits, predict your behaviour and shape your decisions in ways that feel natural but are inherently manipulative. As we get comfortable letting algorithms decide what we watch, eat, read and buy, we lose the basic skill of decision-making.

AI’s best friends insist that this is ‘new literacy’, that the Next Gen only needs to learn how to use tools efficiently. But if they delve deeper, the true cost may hit them. Learning is not about the speed of information retrieval, it is about the process of facing challenges, cultivating discipline and building mental strength. Short-circuited, all muscles atrophy. Tellingly, these muscles are in our brain.

This erosion is not limited to classrooms. In daily life, children are becoming less capable of functioning without technological aid. Even adults are faltering—some rely on GPS to drive familiar routes; parents turn to Smart-home devices for schedules; and nearly everyone glances at devices to access the phone number or contact details of even family members and friends. Empathy is being automated. Even therapists are competing with mental health chatbots. Embracing such a culture of substitution, sans enhancement, we are creating a generation skilled in using intelligence, but not in developing it.

Reclaiming Human Brains

The simple point is… Are we creating morons? The answer may be ‘No’ in the clinical sense. If that be the case, we are creating something far more dangerous—a generation that is happily relinquishing its cognitive sovereignty for comfort, speed and convenience. Who is responsible for this? Not machines, surely, but the same cannot be said for those who created the machines. By teaching children how to use AI, without teaching them when not to, we are playing with fire. We are rewarding shortcuts, not effort. We are sacrificing human skills for a disposable commodity. AI is brilliant, but it is not human.

Machines can be taught to mimic intelligence, but they can never replicate wisdom, intuition or moral judgment. With all respect to AI, be it American, Chinese, European or Elonish Muskian, machines are but tools designed by man—efficient, functional and bloody soulless. The brain is not a filing cabinet; it is the foundation of human insight, creativity and identity. If you disagree, look at history’s great minds such as Einstein, Da Vinci, Curie or Bach. They weren’t brilliant because they could access facts, but because they absorbed knowledge and feelings, juggled with this memory and reassembled it in new ways. If we outsource that foundational process to machines, what remains of intelligence?

The danger is not that AI will surpass human intelligence, but that we may just stop looking for wisdom and intellectual maturity and growth. In our quest to make things easier, we may inadvertently make ourselves irrelevant. Moore’s Law gave us miraculous machines. But it did not promise meaning, purpose or humanity. That was all us. Machines are not making us morons. We are doing that all by ourselves.

The writer is a veteran journalist and communications specialist. He can be reached on [email protected]. Views expressed are personal