Arguably we already have, if you concentrate on intelligence rates since 1975: the reverse Flynn affect. Those who grew up about that time no longer had to generate their own entertainment through storytelling, make their own music, calculate things mentally: everyday they had music, entertainment pumped into their homes, a way to avoid athematic, etc. And now we're evening thinking a lot less in our jobs, not even practicing the skills we learnt. Intelligence is only going to decrease.

It’s tempting to use what engineers were 70 years ago vs now as an analogy. From a technical point of view, I was told we would be struggling to solve the maths and physics exercises our grand fathers took as students in college, and they had to deal with additional disciplines that disappeared like industrial design (ie drawing blueprints by hand) or manual calculus. So it is tempting to think that the level of engineers has gone down.

But a modern engineer has computers, math software, can code, has all the knowledge of the internet at their fingertips. With all that assistance I believe modern engineers are way more productive and capable.

I disagree that it's necessarily laziness.

I work in the embedded space, and I routinely have to work with technologies I'm initially not familiar with. Internet searches are very hit and miss. So, is "AI". I generally use every tool at my disposal to try to get my foot in the door so I can understand better questions to ask and get the technical information I need to do my job.

I absolutely have no problem with someone replying to my question with a response from Claude. I appreciate them telling me the source, so I can assign an appropriate level of trust in the information.

I didn't expect wall-e to become so close to current reality

Similar to physical exercise and machines replacing it, I think we're going to see extremes on both ends.

All machines are for laziness.

Human evolution does not occur in a vecuum. I suspect there will still be preasure to get smarter (how ever way you define that) because of competition with other humans.

  Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?

I’d like to add that for hardware development (in my experience) it’s been non-stop double checking because of hallucinations. To the point where I don’t use it for weeks.

it's already happening. IQ is already stagnating or even going down

Not sure about de-evolution (devolution is the word I think), just a change in how people and brains work - but you could already see this happening the past few decades. I can't read a technical book or documentation end to end ever since google results came up with specific answers within seconds.

Some people use it to think less, some people use it to learn more.

I think we're going to see a sort of "intelligence caste" form. People who overuse AI and atrophy their brain's ability to think will be on the bottom, while the inverse of those people will be on top.

This is somewhat good news because it means the end (to some extent) of the Peter Principle. My hope, though, is that this doesn't turn into an actual caste system, but I'm not holding my breath. I think that's where this all goes: we're in the process of the world's intelligence being strip-mined and resold back to the world at a premium. The only ones who "survive" long-term are the ones who refuse to submit all of their mental faculties to AI.

That inevitably leads to a rapid degeneration of the species. Only way to avoid that outcome entirely is to remind people that their brain is valuable and they need to exercise it just like they would the rest of their body.

We're already seeing it.

Human intelligence evolved without technology, so, no.

Only in corporate setting.

Well, apparently, our brain sizes have shrunk something like 30% over the last 10,000 years. This is primarily because ancient man needed to be a jack of all trades just to survive in the wilderness. Once civilization and specialization took over we just didn’t need all that processing power since a lot of that work was just outsourced to civilization and society.

Alcohol has existed for zillions of years, but not literally every person is a useless drunkard.

You could consider it a class of predator on people who have vulnerabilities that can give way to dependence on the LLM and an inability to function. It could be seen in that light. The underlying problem is being described in that light.

> Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?

A de-evolution of culture for the sake of efficiency, sure. The entire culture will shift to a greater degree of superficiality, not just because of the lack of deep understanding of what they're doing, but because AI will condition (and is conditioning) people to want the more superficial stuff.

This isn't a phenomenon exclusive to AI - but AI is at the apex of it and is the worst we've seen so far because it, much more than anything else, targets the mental domain whereas most previous automations have targeted the physical but the mental as well to a lesser extent.

The end result is a huge amount of technical debt that simply can't be recovered and a huge increase in myopia that will prevent us from truly understanding and solving serious problems that will undoubtedly occur.

Most people can't see this because they're already addicted to the dopamine hit of the tech, but it's one reason I'm 100% anti-AI and I hate it with an immense passion.