Are You Smarter Than Someone 100 Years Ago?

I was talking to a friend of mine recently, he’s a true believer in technological progress. The kind of person who sees this as the best time to be alive and the past being full of pain and suffering. He’s a “technology will cure all societal ills”, think about about self-driving cars, AI creating unlimited abundance, robots handling menial tasks, and breakthroughs in medicine that will erase most diseases. Call them technologists, futurists, whatever. One thing they all share is a subtle disdain for the past.

So, I posed a question: Do you think a person from 100 years ago, all else being equal, might be smarter than someone today?

This question has been explored before in science fiction novels before. Take the 2020 Seth Rogen movie “An American Pickle”, about a man from a century ago who wakes up in the modern world and tries to navigate in it. The film asks: Could someone from the past adapt to us faster than we could adapt to their world? Not that the movie’s good, it's Seth Rogen, so you know what you're getting, but the premise is worth thinking about.

My friend laughed at first. He looked at me like I was stupid. “Of course we are smarter” he remarked, “we know more things today. We have access to more information today than they used to." He also mentioned the Flynn Effect. The phenomenon of steady increase in IQ scores over generations, documented across countries and tests.

@drjaleelmohammed

The Flynn Effect #intelligence #jamesflynn #flynneffect

His argument made sense at first. We’ve built incredible tools, and with them, we can accomplish things unimaginable a century or two ago. The modern human in 2025 operates with immense power, not because we’re inherently smarter, but because we stand on the shoulders of giants. Human culture accumulates knowledge, it builds on itself. That’s what separates us from animals. We've inherited centuries of accumulated knowledge.

But there’s something missing in that argument, something deeper about how we adopt and adapt to new technology. It’s not just about progress; it’s about trade-offs. The nature of intelligence is changing

When we imagine someone from 1925 transported to our time, we picture them marveling at our smartphones and struggling with our digital interfaces. And they would. However, drop any of us into 1925, and our supposed sophistication crumbles. While we've mastered clicking through menus and troubleshooting Wi-Fi, they knew how to read the stars, repair their own tools, and survive without Google's guidance.

The question isn’t just who’s smarter, it’s how intelligence shifts with technology and what’s lost in the process. If technological progress reshapes what we value in intelligence, what happens to the skills we’re trading away? Are we building a world where essential human capabilities, like spatial awareness, memory, or social fluency, become obsolete?

Modern life has changed us, it demands higher abstract reasoning, navigating virtual spaces, interpreting data, and engaging with complex systems foster these skills.

Technology and Skill Erosion

Every technological leap forward carries a hidden price. You gain something with technology, sometimes it’s efficiency, safety, or time-saving. But you give something up. Call it skill replacement or more realistically, skill erosion.

Here are a few examples

1) People have a hard time writing legibly by hand now because they type all day. Barely anyone knows how to write cursive, an aesthetically pleasing form of handwriting. Is it a big deal? Maybe. Maybe not. But handwriting is so old and imprinted into us it comes with benefits that are now lost. Handwriting improves memory and learning because it activates more brain regions than typing. Typing is immensely more convenient but you should be aware of this crucial tradeoff.

2) Or consider navigation. GPS has transformed us from active navigators into passive direction-followers. Traditional navigation required a rich mental map of our environment, understanding landmarks, sensing cardinal directions, reading the position of the sun. They were cognitive exercises that enhanced spatial reasoning and problem-solving. Now we follow blue lines on screens, our innate navigational abilities atrophying with each "recalculating."

3) Perhaps most profound is how technology is reshaping human connection. Dating apps have replaced the subtle art of reading body language and detecting mutual attraction, skills honed over thousands of years of evolution. Using dating apps means you don't recognize flirting signals. This makes in-person romance much more difficult and forces you to rely on dating apps and optimize your profile and get better at “text communication'“, which is fundamentally different than in-person communication.

@daveperrotta

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Skill Erosion From My Personal Life

I’ll give you an example of this skill erosion from my personal life.

Ever since I went remote 4 years ago I lost the ability to coworker speak. Mixing it up over the water fountain. Medium distance conversations. A bit personal a bit not. All I can do is talk to people like they are my best friend or a cashier now. I've lost the medium distance talk skill.

Look, the trade-off works for me. I don’t want to be back in an office 5 days a week. But I am aware there is a skill involving talking to coworkers.

Previous technological shifts happened slowly. It took generations for humans to move from oral to written culture. But today's changes demand adaptation within months.

Understanding Trade offs is going to be an important question going forward. Self-Driving cars are already here. AI agents are going to be here soon. You will be able to cognitively offload a lot of your tasks to them. The future is coming and it will mean our skills for it have to change.

In This Newsletter

1) AI Will Accelerate Skill Erosion: AI will accelerate skill erosion by automating tasks that once required manual effort or critical thinking, leading people to rely on technology rather than maintaining their own abilities.

2) Are the Trade-offs Worth It? Not all cognitive abilities are equally fundamental or valuable. There's a hierarchy of cognitive skills, and what we're often trading away are more basic, essential abilities in exchange for more specialized or superficial ones.

3) Trade-Offs Throughout History: Humans have been doing trade-offs throughout history. It’s nothing new.

AI and Skill Erosion

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