The OECD conducts an assessment called PISA that measures the reading, science, and maths skills of 15-year-olds. The latest results are quite dismal. Across much of the world, kids are getting worse at reading and maths, and the decline isn’t small.

COVID probably explains some of this, but there seems to be a longer-term trend at play. And now there’s AI.

I can see a lot of this in myself. Pretty much every post I write now goes through ChatGPT, Claude, etc. Because I know AI will fix my grammar and typos, there’s less incentive to get them right in the first place. And over time, I genuinely feel like my writing without AI is getting worse.

I keep asking K (CTO) about coding and whether something similar is happening with our tech team. His answer isn’t very reassuring either. 😬

All of this makes me wonder what the right approach is with kids. On the one hand, you don’t want them outsourcing thinking, writing, problem-solving, etc., before they’ve learnt how to do these things themselves by making mistakes. On the other hand, if they’re growing up in a world where AI will be a big part of their lives, you want them to be good at using it.

The problem with humans is that, given a choice between an easy thing and a hard thing, we’ll almost always choose the easy path. The same applies to AI. Even if it can help us think and do more, I think most of us will end up outsourcing a lot of our thinking and doing to it.

I don’t know how many here have watched Idiocracy, but sometimes it feels like we are accelerating towards it. 😬

PS: Idiocracy is about an average man who wakes up 500 years in the future to discover that human intelligence has declined so much that he is now the smartest person alive.🙂

Chart source : The Economist

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