Every technological revolution arrives with its prophecy of intellectual decay. They said it about books, then about television, and now about artificial intelligence. The article in El Diario about the supposed golden age of stupidity repeats that old fear in new language. But if we look at the evidence through psychology, the picture is very different.
Technology does change the way we think, yes. It affects attention, reorganizes memory, and encourages a growing dependence on external devices. However, that doesn’t mean we’re becoming less intelligent. The human brain doesn’t shut down when we use digital tools: it reorganizes itself. What science calls cognitive offloading (delegating certain mental tasks to external supports) doesn’t imply loss, but adaptation. Just as we once began writing to free up oral memory, now we externalize data so we can focus on more complex processes. That’s basically why we don’t remember phone numbers anymore.
The real problem appears when we confuse convenience with thought. If we let algorithms decide for us, intelligence doesn’t weaken: it falls asleep. But the culprit isn’t the machine; it’s the user who gives up the mental friction required to understand the world. Social psychology explains this catastrophism as negativity bias: we often overvalue what we lose and ignore what we gain. From the printing press to AI, the fear of cognitive decline is more emotional than scientific.
Today we know that the brain adapts to the digital environment just as it once adapted to written language. We’re not witnessing an intellectual collapse, but a reconfiguration. The challenge isn’t to resist technology, but to learn to use it with critical attention. Thinking remains a voluntary act, even if the world keeps trying to distract us.
We’re not living through a golden age of stupidity. We’re living through an age of cognitive mutation. Intelligence isn’t dying: it’s changing shape. The real danger doesn’t lie in machines that think too much, but in humans who’ve stopped doing so.