Long live the new idiocracy

Opinion artificial intelligenceliterature Long live the new idiocracy New Idiocracy 1024x683 Relevant News Long live the new idiocracy 20 July 2026 Slow justice is costing Cyprus, EU scoreboard shows 20 July 2026 Gunmen fire more than 10 shots at Germasogeia office building 20 July 2026 Yiorgos Savvinidis 20 July 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber I’ve noticed that the public conversation about artificial intelligence is still stuck on the same Promethean question: will it wake up one day, cut the cord, and turn on the people who built it, like Frankenstein’s monster? It’s a question as old as storytelling itself, frankly a bit of a cliché. But as a premise, it never stops being gripping. It feeds our imagination, our philosophy, our anxieties, in much the same way ancient myth once did. What I keep wondering, though, is whether it’s a distraction from a danger that’s far more immediate and practical. Not something waiting for us in ten or twenty years. Something already happening, right in front of us. Heavy use of large language models is reshaping how we use our own minds. We write less. We read less. Rarely do we follow a thought all the way from start to finish. A long piece of writing, this one included, feels tiring. Reading an actual book now demands a kind of trained patience most of us have simply stopped stocking. If a post, a press release, a news story, anything, starts to feel AI-written, and we bail out after the first few “suspicious” lines. Funny how that concern evaporates the moment we’re the ones using it to save ourselves time and effort. This is just one function among many we’ve already handed over to technology without remorse. Take the fact, and nobody seems remotely bothered by this, that GPS has quietly dismantled our spatial memory and our sense of direction. “Just ask someone the way” is basically unthinkable now, unless the someone in question is the little device in your pocket that’s become your second brain. Maybe your first. Before that, calculators throttled our mental arithmetic and let the muscle waste away. Did we lose sleep over it? Psychology calls this cognitive offloading, a kind of natural extension of working memory. It’s been happening for millennia, from the invention of writing to the abacus. What’s different now is that we’re outsourcing the functions tied to language, imagination, judgement. In other words, the actual tools of thought itself. Mike Judge’s sci-fi comedy Idiocracy hit cinemas in 2006. If you’ve never seen it, you’re not missing much; it imagines a future world sunk in stupidity because humanity simply stopped exercising its brain. The film flopped. A decade later, after Trump’s first election, it clawed its way to cult status. Today it’s treated as something close to prophecy, a satire of cognitive decay that got there early. Ancient Greek myth had already wrestled with this, long before “runaway technology” meant anything at all. Alongside fire, Prometheus gave humanity technology, mastery over matter, and the unquenchable spark of curiosity and creativity. It’s a force of divine origin and unmeasurable power that the human species is left to tame. Daedalus built the wings, but Icarus needed the restraint and the wisdom to use them properly. A tool wielded without limits is a catastrophe waiting to happen. I read an interview with Stephen Fry in K magazine, occasioned by his own retelling of the Odyssey. In it, he worries that if that same flame is ever passed to a machine, we might see the old cycle from Greek myth repeat itself: creators toppled by their own creations. I don’t know whether large language models will ever develop a mind of their own. But maybe that’s the wrong question. The real one might be what happens if we’re the ones who lose the habits and abilities that built our civilisation over centuries. If we stop reading books, stop writing without a technological crutch, stop wrestling with a difficult idea before reaching for a ready-made answer? Last May, in his first-ever encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, the new Pope Leo XIV didn’t treat artificial intelligence as either a demon or a saviour. Instead he asked a different question: how do we protect human dignity in an age where intelligence itself seems to be running on autopilot? Perhaps one unintended gift of AI is that it’s forced us to confront the most basic question of all: who are we? It’s entirely possible that, just as with GPS and calculators, we’ll hand certain core functions over to the machine and watch our own faculties and values drift elsewhere. Ideally, towards experience, empathy, meaning-making, responsibility. That would be nice, but I’m not holding my breath. Let’s leave the utopian daydreaming aside and flag one more serious risk. We know large language models are trained on existing text, on the accumulated residue of human thought, recombining patterns drawn from our own tradition. So what happens in a few years, once a huge share of that text has itself been written by AI, or by people writing like AI? Model “autophagy”, models feeding on their own output, is already showing up. Knowledge recycles itself, variation shrinks, ideas flatten into the predictable. Copy feeding copy: a ruinous loop. But if we humans stop producing original thought, the well runs dry too. And it won’t just be us who end up stupider. It’ll be the very tool meant to stand in for our intelligence. Whatever that ends up meaning. Obviously the answer isn’t handing the fire back to the gods. We’re talking about a genuinely useful, arguably revolutionary tool that could take us somewhere extraordinary. But we might need to decide, and soon, which human faculties are worth protecting from the sheer convenience of automation. However we go about it, it looks like the real task will be keeping curiosity, writing, reading, critical thought and creativity alive and kicking. Otherwise, we won’t even need a machine uprising to go under. We’ll manage it ourselves. 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