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jpnc | on: Don't be a meat proxy
If you create a machine for laziness you're going to get lazy people. It's only going to get worse I'm afraid.

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

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tarkin2 | parent | next
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.
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cm2187 | parent | next
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.

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teaearlgraycold | root | parent
And I know fuck all about subsistence farming - something most people's ancestors understood deeply. Different worlds, different requirements.
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Yiin | parent | next
I didn't expect wall-e to become so close to current reality
Gigachad | root | parent
The only thing they missed was the invention of ozempic.
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usef- | parent | next
Similar to physical exercise and machines replacing it, I think we're going to see extremes on both ends.
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64e23275635e | parent | next
it's already happening. IQ is already stagnating or even going down
c048 | root | parent | next
What's even more worrying is that I've heared plenty of people defend it as, "Younger generations are just intelligent in different ways compared to older generations."

I'm halfway through my 30's and this downturn started with my generation, halfway through the 80's. I hope I'm missing something, because I still need to see a benefit for lower attention spans, lower comprehensive reading skills and lower critical thinking capabilities.

Cthulhu_ | root | parent | next
Halfway through 30's means you were born in the 90's though, but other than that you're right, the advent of the internet, google, and rapid fire short form content has messed with our attention spans; the following generation grew up on the internet and saw the advent of high intensity videos and then short-form mobile-only infinite-stream short-form dashed-words videos.
wannabe44 | root | parent | next
To add, less articulate and somewhat overtly anti-intellectual. Why even learn something when you can ask the slot machine?
Cthulhu_ | root | parent
The anti-intellectualism is so weird to me, it feels like people get overly defensive and angry (a secondary emotional response to shame) when confronted with their own lack of knowledge / intelligence or when asked or challenged to use their own brain.
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drekipus | root | parent
The benefits are increased productivity, consumer satisfaction, and shareholder profits
voidUpdate | root | parent | next
IQ is calibrated so that the average IQ is 100. If the average IQ is going down, something has gone very wrong somewhere
everfrustrated | root | parent | next
IQ is a relative measure not an absolute one. 100 IQ in 2026 can be massively different in absolute terms to 100 IQ in 1956.

If you look at old test papers - the lack of intelligence in modern times is very stark.

voidUpdate | root | parent | next
Yes, but the comment was about IQ, not absolute intelligence. The median intelligence is, by definition, 100 IQ, so the median IQ cannot be decreasing
debugnik | root | parent | next
There's always a lag, you calibrate the test based on previous results, not future ones. If intelligence is decreasing I'd expect every IQ test to keep scoring a median lower than 100 unless taken immediately after calibration. Once it stops decreasing they'd converge again.
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vidarh | root | parent
Look up the Flynn effect. You're right in the first paragraph, but wrong about the direction.
inigyou | root | parent
The Flynn effect ended several years ago and started reversing.
vidarh | root | parent
Even if that turns out to be true, rather than it starting to hit a ceiling where we can expect it to not consistently go in a single direction it does not alter anything I wrote, which addressed a comparison between 1956 and 2026.

The claim of a "lack of intelligence in modern times" is flat out contradicted by the data. It'd take a lot of regression to get back to 1956 levels.

Cthulhu_ | root | parent | next
IQ is a measure that tests how well people can do IQ tests, I don't think it's an objective measure at all.
Sharlin | root | parent
People love to say this, but the whole point of IQ is that it happens to correlate well with many other, more practical measures of cognitive capability. That’s why it is used.
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mrheosuper | root | parent | next
I wonder why is that, what the point of having a score that you can not compare them without external context (the day of taking exam)
energy123 | root | parent | next
IQ gets manually recalibrated downwards when people get stupider so it's mean 100 by construction.
vintermann | root | parent
Hmm, who does the calibration, and how scientific are they about it? Can we check their work?
dinkumthinkum | root | parent
I feel like this post unironically proves the point.
dupontcyborg | root | parent
i’m not doubting this, but do you know if there are any studies on this already?
exac | root | parent | next
https://phys.org/news/2023-03-online-iq-scores-century.html https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2023.101734
denkmoon | root | parent | next
US centric data, absolutely useless. This is just measuring american decline, not civilisation changes.
vidarh | root | parent
It's also a first time decline afterany decades of steady increases. We have no basis for determining causality - it might just be that we've finally maxed out the possible gains from the causes underlying the Flynn effect.
evil-olive | root | parent | next
that's a study published in 2023, analyzing data that ended in 2018.
dofm | root | parent
Right but the question was:

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

Not LLMs specifically.

Insofar as I believe there is value in IQ tests, this is a technology-driven effect, most likely due to the impact of distraction and search result immediacy on sustained thinking.

IQs used to just rise, year on year, because living in the world required more and more of the thinking that IQ tests measure. And now they don't.

petesergeant | root | parent
Hard not to see what you’ve just done here as an analogue of what the article is arguing against
64e23275635e | root | parent
I am the lazy human today, but this one is listing a few references:

https://www.pressenza.com/2025/07/the-decline-of-the-intelli...

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jayd16 | parent | next
All machines are for laziness.
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cryo32 | root | parent | next
This is totally wrong.

Some machines are capability amplifiers.

Other machines are shit puking buck passing time sinks.

globular-toast | root | parent | next
I think you are confusing machines with motors. Many machines do things that simply are not possible without. A bicycle, for example, is not at any less work than walking, but it enables you to go faster than you can run. Menually operated sewing machines produce stitches that would be infeasible by hand.

Motorising any of those machines could be considered lazy, though.

hk__2 | root | parent | next
> A bicycle, for example, is not at any less work than walking

Of course it is, at equivalent distance.

Ekaros | root | parent | next
Depending on speed of course. At some speeds drag will cause significantly more work.
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deepsummer | root | parent | next
But you could still arrive if you walk instead of using the bicycle. And I am sure you can do the same stitches by hand, it just takes forever.

Same with coding agents. I could do it by hand. It just would take much longer. Often so long that it would be impractical.

globular-toast | root | parent
You cannot walk 100 miles in a day, but anyone with a bit of training can cycle that in an afternoon. It's not a matter of effort or laziness, it's simply not possible.

The stitching comment is just pedantic. People don't hand stitch like a machine not because they are lazy, it's because it's ineffective and impractical. It's not impossible to drive screws directly into softwood by hand, but you'd never get anything done that way. It's not lazy to choose another method, it's just being an effective worker.

As for coding agents, it's clearly effective to write software without them because we have been doing it for decades so far. It still remains to be seen whether they are laziness (ie. it's just a motor) or if they are actually enabling new possibilities (ie. we get software that really wouldn't have been possible before).

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deepsummer | root | parent
Can you write 10k LOC a day without a coding agent?

It's the same issue. You can walk 100 miles. Just not in a day. And you can create 10k LOC without a coding agent. Just not in a day.

I don't think that coding agents enable technical possibilities. They just allow things that wouldn't be economically possible without them.

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raincole | root | parent
> A bicycle, for example, is not at any less work than walking

What? Have you, uh, ridden a bicycle before...?

globular-toast | root | parent
Thousands of miles on foot and tens of thousands on bicycle. Walking is essentially zero effort, so I don't see how cycling can really be easier, unless you are going downhill. People cycle because it's faster, not because it's easier. People drive because it's easier (many people still drive even if it takes longer than cycling).
monadgonad | root | parent | next
> People cycle because it's faster, not because it's easier

That may be true, but the fact is that cycling is a more energy-efficient form of transport than walking. It takes literally less effort to go the same distance.

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hahahaa | root | parent
Cycling 2km flat (assume okay bike under 12kg) is easier than walking it. Source: have fibro so I really fell compound effort in every fibre.
4gotunameagain | root | parent
What about exercise machines ?
jayd16 | root | parent
[flagged]
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4gotunameagain | root | parent
What about the elliptical ?
usef- | root | parent
What about it? You might need to do multiple different exercises outside to mimic it
4gotunameagain | root | parent
Which exercise outside mimics that movement while simultaneously being so easy on the joints ?

Anyway this is just silly, we are splitting hairs. A lot of machines have a functional purpose and do not exist for the lazy. The LHC, ships, thousands of examples.

master-lincoln | root | parent
Aren't ships just for people too lazy to swim and the large hadron collider for physicists that are too lazy to hand-accelerate particles and make them collide with 13.6 TeV of energy? /s
Cthulhu_ | parent | next
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.
hahahaa | root | parent
A technical book can be so relaxing (unless e.g. too highly technical... think quantum mechanics). Imagine 50k words on an interesting tech topic without a context switch!
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ryu2k2 | parent | next
We're already seeing it.
f6v | parent | next
Human intelligence evolved without technology, so, no.
| root | parent
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Applejinx | parent | next
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.

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