Artificial Intelligence Is Making Us All Dumber or Is It? (realworldprogrammer.com)

This article probes whether AI is making us “dumber” or simply reshaping how we think. Framing the shift from pre-internet learning to today’s AI-first web, it highlights how AI summaries, agentic browsers and general-purpose LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini) are supplanting manual search and deep exploration—YouGov (July 2025) finds 15% of adults now use AI platforms to look for information, rising to 45% among heavy users. The piece warns that LLMs are essentially “fancy autocomplete” prone to hallucinations: confidently fabricated citations, broken code, and plausible falsehoods. Those hallucinations can propagate into articles and search indexes, be re-ingested into training corpora, and create a self-reinforcing misinformation loop that erodes memory retention, critical thinking and fact‑checking practices. But the article also offers a counterpoint: maybe this is an evolution toward “meta‑intelligence,” where value shifts from memorizing facts to framing questions, judging outputs, and applying creativity. For AI/ML practitioners and the community, the implications are concrete: prioritize provenance, calibration and hallucination-mitigation in model design; improve attribution and tools for verification; study human–AI workflows that preserve curiosity and critical skills; and rethink user interfaces that encourage deeper validation rather than passive acceptance. The debate isn’t just about IQ decline—it’s about redesigning systems and education to ensure AI augments good judgment instead of replacing it.