The alarming state of the human mindset

December 5, 2024 - Reading time: 8 minutes

One of my friends decided to create an educational website. It was a fantastic idea, and I fully encouraged him to pour his heart into the project. However, a lingering question kept nagging me: Are people curious enough to pay attention to this kind of work?

Unfortunately, I was right to worry. The web traffic to his site was so low that he began to feel anxious about what he was doing wrong. Generating a large number of web clicks wasn't the problem - after all, paying Google a few hundred dollars could easily drive traffic. The real issue was that behind these clicks, there were no actual people exploring the content on his website. Essentially, he ended up buying an "army" of internet bots created by the web search company, designed to make him believe his investment was worthwhile.

This experience reminded me of my own educational YouTube channel. After creating it, I initially gained a handful of subscribers, mostly friends and family members. But then came the big question: What next? I decided to invest a few hundred dollars in Google Ads to boost views and subscribers. It worked - I gained a couple of thousand subscribers and hundreds of thousands of views. At first, I was happy; it seemed like a good deal, and I felt I had gotten what I paid for. But then I stopped running ads and uploaded a few new videos. To my surprise, they received zero views. Zero. None of my so-called "subscribers" showed the slightest interest in my new content!

This left me wondering: Are these subscribers even real? A quick scan of their usernames and profile pages suggested otherwise. Many had AI-generated profile pictures and seemed suspiciously fake. It was as though I had paid for a mirage - a fabricated audience with no genuine interest.

It is no longer unusual to see YouTubers with over 2 million subscribers but only a few dozen (real) comments are seen below their videos. And you start to wonder: Okay, you paid for these subscribers, but do you feel better knowing that only an infinitesimal fraction of them care about what you say? What usually happens is this: a portion of the profit earned from video ads is redirected back into ads to gain more views and bot subscribers, creating a spiral of artificial "engagement" on their channels. It's just a business, nothing more.

I've noticed a massive drop in interest in educational web content immediately after the COVID pandemic. I ran many such websites, including one that offers a free program for scientists, which is one of the largest in the world in terms of code examples. Here's the link if you're curious: https://datamelt.org. Interestingly, I didn't observe a decline in the number of clicks or views. However, I use different methods to assess engagement on these websites, and while the number of views steadily increased, true engagement dropped to nearly zero. By "engagement" I'm not referring to metrics like time spent on the site, as internet companies typically measure. I'm talking about genuine engagement - something only a website creator can truly define (like questions on forums or suggestions).

In one of my previous blogs [1], I emphasized the unusual gap between the apparent presence of people on the Internet and the actual online engagement that can be attributed to real individuals who can pay attention. This large gap was not so obvious 20 years ago, during the early stages of the Internet. Back then, it was very easy to correlate the number of webpage views with the number of truly engaged people, who care or ask something.

Does this indicate that people have become less curious about knowledge-focused content today compared to the past? Have they stopped valuing knowledge as they did before COVID?

It's hard to say definitively. One can still see the familiar scene on buses or trains: people endlessly scrolling through TikTok or Instagram reels with vacant expressions. This kind of fleeting, surface-level curiosity - holding attention for just one or two seconds per clip - isn't new in recent years. What's alarming, however, is how these social media platforms drain attention and redirect curiosity toward fake content that carries little to no meaningful value. These "social time-wasters"  seem to train our brains to ignore reality and disregard things of true value - those that demand focus, deep thought, and effort to acquire meaningful knowledge.

Are we becoming more intellectually diminished as our brains are rewired? It seems increasingly evident, as research has already shown, that COVID has impacted our cognitive abilities [2]. Many people struggle to focus on cognitive tasks, relying heavily on computers and AI tools for answers. This reduction in mental capacity is especially evident in students who often find it difficult to create simple logical bridges between observations or arguments.

True knowledge requires forming connections between abstract ideas - a process that lies fundamentally beyond the reach of any AI. Machines, by their nature, cannot generate new knowledge [3] or comprehend it as we do. They can only extract data from its databases, apply algorithms, blend existing data, and present results in grammatically and (sometimes) semantically coherent forms. While it may list established facts, it fundamentally lacks what we call "understanding" or meaning, that can only be obtained by the human mind through the transcendent activity of our consciousness. AI delivers information processed and experienced by us in the past. It cannot provide the answers that require human creativity, understanding, and intellectual effort to generate anew.

It's undeniably true that the internet is saturated with bots, which have become increasingly popular tools for deceiving advertisers into spending their money. However, another troubling aspect of this problem is that we, as humans, are gradually becoming more like these Internet bots. We've turned into web clickers, with attention lasting just a few seconds before flipping to the next page on our smartphones. The reel where a cat jumps at an LCD TV screen is more popular than the one featuring Moscow officials explaining how they're preparing to nuke Western countries that strike Russian territories. Thrilling, so cool! Oh, wait - just swipe to the next reel, where a prank creates a gadget that would never work in real life because it defies the laws of physics. That's exciting too!

The problem isn't that AI is becoming more like humans; the problem is that we, as humans, are becoming more like robots - programmable and easily manipulated. The Singularity will occur when we, in our degradation, will merge with more complex algorithms that trim, blend and reorganize the information created by our ancestors, without acknowledging the original thinkers. And perhaps they don't even need to be more sophisticated - it may be enough for us to degrade even further.

Dr. S.V.Chekanov (The Knowledge Standard Foundation, https://encyclosphere.org/)

References

[1] "The problem of missing people on the Internet". Article. By S.V.Chekanov (July 26, 2024), URL: https://jwork.org/home/the-problem-of-missing-people-on-the-internet

[2] "Cognition and Memory after Covid-19 in a Large Community Sample". By A. Hampshire and others. Article. Published February 28, 2024, N Engl J Med 2024;390:806-818. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa2311330, VOL. 390 NO. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2311330

[3] "The Designed World of Information: Unveiling the Incredible Realm Beyond", Book. by Dr. Sergei V. Chekanov (2024) Paperback: 466 pages, IngramSpark, ISBN: 9798990642836, Book webpage: https://ermislearn.org/designed-world/