D'oh!

IQ scores are shrinking, brain rot is setting in and with every technological advance we are finding it harder to work, remember, think and function. Is digital convenience costing us dearly?

-  By Sophie McBain

STEP INTO the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab in Cambridge, US, and the future feels a little closer. Glass cabinets display prototypes of weird and wonderful creations, from tiny desktop robots to a surrealist sculpture created by an AI model prompted to design a tea set from body parts. In the lobby, an AI waste-sorting assistant named Oscar can tell you where to put your used coffee cup. Five floors up, research scientist Nataliya Kosmyna has been working on wearable brain-computer interfaces she hopes will one day enable people who cannot speak, due to neurodegenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, to communicate using their minds.

Kosmyna spends a lot of her time reading and analysing people's brain states. Another project she is working on is a wearable device - one prototype looks like a pair of glasses - that can tell when someone is getting confused or losing focus. Around two years ago, she began receiving emails from strangers who reported that they had started using large language models such as ChatGPT and felt their brain had changed as a result. Their memories didn't seem as good - was that even possible, they asked her? Kosmyna herself had been struck by how quickly people had already begun to rely on generative AI. She noticed colleagues using ChatGPT at work, and the applications she received from researchers hoping to join her team started to look different. Their emails were longer and more formal and, sometimes, when she interviewed candidates on Zoom, she noticed they kept pausing before responding and looking off to the side - were they getting AI to help them, she wondered. And if they were using AI, how much did they even understand of the answers they were giving?