Gen Z Is the First Generation Dumber Than Their Parents, Neuroscientist Claims For the first time ever, a new generation is officially dumber than the previous one. Congrats, Gen Z, you really did it.

Source: www.vice.com/en/article/...

Because the default environment won’t give it to you anymore.

Even with books - if I catch myself skimming, I know I’m cheating the process. Or parenting - if you solve every small problem for a kid - they stay calm, but don’t grow. Let them struggle, let them fail.

If you want depth, you have to choose friction.

We removed too much resistance from the system and brains adapt fast.
If the environment rewards speed, they optimize for speed.
Depth becomes optional. Then rare.

Reading this made me reflect on my own habits.

... but without friction, there’s nothing forcing correction.

The same pattern shows up across dozens of countries once digital tech gets deeply embedded into classrooms and I don’t think the takeaway is "tech is bad". He explicitly says he’s not anti-tech.

Skim.
Scroll.
Skip.
Next.

You don’t stay with ideas long enough for them to actually shape you.

Confidence didn’t drop.
In many cases, it went up.

So you get this strange combo:
lower measured ability, higher perceived ability.

Horvath calls it out in a way I liked: learning needs friction.

Because if you think about it - every real skill you’ve built came from sitting in confusion longer than you wanted to. Reading things twice. Getting stuck. Pushing through.

Now compare that to how most content is consumed today.

More than half of a teenager’s waking time is on screens. Not just passive screens - fast, fragmented, infinite-scroll screens. The kind that reward quick hits, not deep thinking.

> We replaced long reading with summaries.
> Problem-solving with guided steps.
> Struggle with smooth UX.

A person confidently attempts to assemble IKEA furniture without instructions, ending up with a wobbly three-legged table.

I stumbled on a piece about Jared Cooney Horvath who said that for the first time in modern history, a younger generation is scoring lower than the one before it.

Everything. Attention, memory, literacy, numeracy…

He’s not blaming Gen Z but the environment.

Stories Written Just for Your Child Turn your child into the hero of their own adventure. Add their name, photo, and favorite things to create a one-of-a-kind storybook they'll treasure forever.

Built something I wish existed earlier: personalized kids books + your own voice narration:
kidteller.com

Reading isn't a time problem. It's a silence problem. And the people who learn to sit inside the silence quietly end up with a very unfair advantage.

We've engineered silence out of public life because we can't sit in it.
A book is the opposite of that. One person, one room, one thought for thirty minutes.

No dopamine drip.
No notification.
Just you and the page.

> people don't just find that boring they find it close to dread

His hypothesis was that it's not about time or attention span. It's the SILENCE.

Walk into any cafe, airport, gym, hotel lobby. There's music or something is always playing.

For a long time I took that at face value. Busy life, kids, work, phone, etc.

But recently I watched a clip of David Foster Wallace, and he said something that gave me a completely different perspective on it:

> reading requires sitting alone, in a quiet room and a lot of

When I tell people this, the reaction is almost always the same:

> I don't have time for books
> I can't focus
> I start a book and drop it after 20 pages
> Where do you even find the time? And isn’t it… kind of boring?

I read about 30 books a year, and for me, reading is like enjoying a tasty dessert. I focus on fiction and business, with a mix of roughly 60/40. This balance keeps me sane (and I think my love for books actually inspired me to start building KidTeller too).

That’s exactly where machines win and so companies will optimize. Not because they’re evil - just because that’s what they do.

pay one person ⬅️ OR ➡️ run something 24/7 that keeps improving

You already know the direction. If not… just pretend.

Have a great weekend!

It just… runs. Same speed at 2am, 7pm, Sunday, whatever.
No "bad day", no context switching fatigue, no emotional drain from 10 tiny interruptions.

That changes the game more than you think because most work is about consistency.

1️⃣ show up
2️⃣ do the task
3️⃣ don’t drop quality

You know how it works - you wake up fresh. Maybe 2-4 hours of real focus if you’re lucky. After that it’s downhill. Meetings. Messages. Random stuff pulling you apart.

By afternoon, even simple decisions feel heavy.

Humans are bursty.

AUTOMATA ISN'T

It can connect small issues into big ones - the kind of thinking that usually takes experience to develop and it does so damn naturally.

If it can handle the hardest task then what about about the remaining parts: boring emails, reports, planning, all the stuff we hate and we do daily.

A chalkboard illustrates contrasting productivity between humans and automata, highlighting mental fatigue and efficiency in automation.

Everybody is talking about a new model Mythos, cybersecurity, etc.... but they're missing the actual story.

What’s interesting is that it wasn’t even built for it…. and still beats ‼️ people who spent years there.

I think this is the main part here.

I hope you've found this thread helpful.

Follow me @desunit for more.

Like/Repost the quote below if you can:

Paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2603.20617

But what's the solution!?

Let the free market cure itself, though it will be painful. Historically, this rebalancing usually saved the system but .... much slower than layoffs happen.

Thoughts?

Their solution is a tax on automation (Pigouvian automation tax) but I doubt it will work.

@nntaleb in Antifragility also doesn’t believe in regulation because every time, the winners abuse the system:

> arbitrage regulation
> move jurisdictions
> reshape rules in their favor
etc.

The problem is that over-automation is inevitable because competition pushes firms into it.

The extreme case is high productivity and zero demand.

The paper also highlights that common solutions such as wage adjustments, universal basic income, capital taxes, etc., won’t work here.

I remember @RayDalio in "How the Economic Machine Works" explained that really well. Transactions are the driving force of the economy. If people lose their jobs, they spend less; if they spend less, demand for all firms goes down, and the whole economy slows down.

A cartoon illustrates global tax strategies, featuring a businessman, a robot, and remote workers near a beach, highlighting profit shifting.

AI-driven layoffs undermine the entire economy by reducing consumer demand.

I've expressed these concerns a couple of times already, and now we see a paper with the results.

Enterprises Lose 51 Workdays Per Employee to Technology Friction Annually Despite Record AI Investment, WalkMe Global Study of 3,750 Finds The State of Digital Adoption 2026 reveals a widening trust gap between executives and workers...

Source: www.globenewswire.com/news-releas...

Execs buy the narrative but workers deal with reality and don't know how to use it properly for their tasks.