John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times had some interesting research to share.
Students aside, adults are also scoring lower in reasoning and problem-solving tests.
The share of adults with “basic” abilities has been rising rapidly across developed nations. As with the previous graph, there’s a notable inflection point around 2012.
Again, we see that inflection point around 2012 followed by a steep rise up in our ability to think/concentrate or learn new things.
I call out 2012 because that was around the time we saw rapid increases in smartphone adoption. As Noah Smith points out – “Everyone worries about the changes to human society and cognition that AI will bring, but social-media-enabled smartphones have already crashed into humanity like a meteor, and we’ve barely begun to adapt or even to reckon with the change.”
An inability to think deeply about problems impacts our ability to work, to make better financial decisions, and to elect leaders who will solve the most important problems.
That’s especially hard to do when the competitor is a catchy 30 second video on TikTok.
Needless to say, this isn’t a good thing.
But the first step to solving a problem is to recognize that it exists.
