Is AI covering for our declining brain power?

Ever since I read an article questioning if humans have “passed peak brain power,” I’ve been stuck on one thought: while human focus and problem solving sills are declining, artificial intelligence is rapidly advancing. It feels almost as if nature is re-balancing our cognitive abilities, maintaining, or even increasing the net intelligence overall.

I’ve been comparing the rise of AI with the decline of human intelligence, and it’s eye opening. Clearly, this shift demands a call to action, which I discuss further below.

Humans: Past the peak and drifting lower

• Global PISA scores in reading, maths and science hit their high-water mark around 2012 and have dipped in every round since (OECD PISA 2022 Results).
• Roughly 1 in 4 adults across the OECD, and 1 in 3 in the United States, now test at or below basic numeracy (OECD Survey of Adult Skills 2024 press release)
• CDC trend data show the share of high-schoolers reporting “serious difficulty concentrating, remembering, or making decisions” has risen steadily since the mid-2010s (CDC YRBS Data Summary & Trends Report 2013-2023).

AI: Racing the other way

• On the tough MMLU exam, frontier language-model accuracy climbed from 44 % with GPT-3 (2020) to 87 % with GPT-4 (2023). Nearly doubling in three years. (LLMs surprised us)
• What began as text-only chatbots is now full-on multimodal smarts: GPT-4 (2023) can read images and write code, while GPT-4o (2024) reasons in real time across text, audio, vision, even live video and voice conversations. (GPT4 technical report)
• The compute used in the largest training runs has soared 300 000× since 2012, doubling roughly every 3.4 months. (AI and compute)

Nature’s see-saw

Why this isn’t a downer

Our cognitive abilities aren’t necessarily declining. They’re just evolving to align with new tools and technologies. This shift reminds me of the idea of a future "hybrid species", a blend of biology and technology, which the sci-fi writer Dan Brown describes in his book Origin. Humans and AI will inevitably learn to coexist. The real question is how we adapt to ride this curve.

A Call to Action

I get it, nobody likes to hear that AI might replace their jobs. It’s natural to feel bitterness rather than curiosity toward something that threatens our livelihood. But don’t let that fear make you cynical. Instead, embrace AI and discover how it can make you 10x more productive.

Let AI be your personal assistant, your coach, your therapist, your nutritionist, your workout buddy, travel planner, your everything.

While companies will need fewer people to do the same work they do today, I believe there will be a surge in new jobs and smaller businesses, with AI now lowering the barriers to enterpreneurship.

Our intelligence and abilities aren’t fading. They’re evolving. And the future of human potential looks brighter than ever.