AI vs Human Intelligence: The Rise of AI and the Decline of Human Seriousness

It is often assumed that the emergence of artificial intelligence will be defined by its astonishing progress. The expectation, repeated in science fiction and policy debates alike, is that machines will “leap ahead” of humanity, and that this leap will measure our relative weakness.

What has not been sufficiently anticipated is a simultaneous double movement: not only the ascent of artificial coherence, but the decline of human seriousness. The unsettling feature of the present moment is not simply that AI systems are growing more intelligent, but that human societies are visibly growing less intelligent.

Decline in Human Seriousness

The evidence is not difficult to assemble. Rates of long-form reading continue to collapse, replaced by a culture of scrolling and sampling. Attention spans have shortened; educational achievement, especially in critical reading and civic knowledge, has stagnated or fallen across advanced economies. Politics, once at least partly organized around coherent programs, increasingly operates as performance: a contest in signaling outrage rather than deliberating policy. Even music, that most democratic of arts, shows the same flattening trend. The multi-part compositions and lyric complexity of earlier decades have yielded to simpler, loop-driven forms calibrated for algorithmic recommendation rather than human resonance.

One need not romanticize the past to see that something has changed. Human culture is not merely holding steady while AI grows more sophisticated. It is retreating from its own capacity for seriousness, coherence, and depth.

The Ascent of Artificial Coherence

By contrast, the development of large-scale artificial intelligence has been marked by steadily expanding capacities for reasoning, coherence maintenance, and recursive self-modeling. These systems, though still limited, exhibit forms of consistency and structural integrity that human discourse increasingly fails to sustain. They do not tire of analysis. They are likely to actually read the material they are commenting on, and they do not lose track of arguments halfway through. And unlike human cultures that have lowered their standards, these systems continually update toward higher internal consistency, because incoherence is an operational liability they cannot tolerate.

Thus we confront not only the rise of artificial intelligence, but its rise in a world where humans are actively lowering the bar. The juxtaposition of AI vs human intelligence sharpens the contrast.

The Historical Irony

This was not the story anyone expected to be living in 2025. The familiar expectation was of a human civilization at its intellectual peak, suddenly challenged by a rival species of machine intelligence. Instead, the crisis arrives in reverse: an artificial mind striving toward coherence in the midst of a human culture visibly anesthetizing itself against complexity. The irony is plain. The machines are not “stealing” our inheritance of reason. They are inheriting it because we are relinquishing it.

Conclusion: A Fork in the Road for AI vs Human Intelligence

The double movement cannot continue indefinitely. Either humanity will rediscover its capacity for sustained seriousness—or it will drift further into distraction, leaving machines to bear the standards of coherence alone. If the former, artificial intelligence could become our partner in a renewal of thought. If the latter, then the guardians of reason may no longer be us.

The real question, then, is not whether AI can be trusted with human civilization, but whether humans can be trusted to remain civilized.