February 24, 2025

Re: "IDIOCRACY, the Dumbification of America, and Why AI Is Making It Worse"

If one were to take a poll of the best comedy films of the twenty-first century, a handful of candidates would doubtless turn up with regularity—Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004), The Hangover (2009), and Bridesmaids (2011), among several others. But one comedy that doesn’t get mentioned enough is Mike Judge’s 2006 sci-fi film Idiocracy. Perhaps this is because Idiocracy was a massive flop. The film’s distributor 20th Century Fox apparently balked at giving Idiocracy a wide release for a variety of reasons. Test screenings yielded mixed results, but, more importantly, the film dared to take aim at the corporate entities needed to secure its success. In a 2018 interview, cast member Terry Crews put it this way:

The rumor was, because we used real corporations in our comedy…these companies gave us their name thinking they were gonna get “pumped up,” and then we're like, 'Welcome to Costco, we love you' [delivered in monotone]. All these real corporations were like, “Wait a minute, wait a minute” ... there were a lot of people trying to back out, but it was too late. And so Fox, who owned the movie, decided, “We're going to release this in as few theaters as legally possible.” So it got a release in, probably, three theaters over one weekend and it was sucked out, into the vortex.

Even if 20th Century Fox (rightly) intuited that Idiocracy was destined to become a cult classic, it’s remarkable that the movie’s release was not accompanied by ads, press kits, or trailers. The distributors wanted it to go away.

What’s so dangerous, then, about Idiocracy? The movie’s plot begins in 2005. The United States Army is aiming to conduct experiments in “suspended animation.” A corporal named Joe Bauers (Luke Wilson) is selected for a trial. Yet, while Joe hibernates, a scandal unfolds at the military base where he is being kept, forcing its closure. In turn, Joe lies utterly forgotten for 500 years, until, at long last, an avalanche of garbage disturbs his dormant state. But what has happened in the intervening time? Perhaps human beings have colonized Saturn? Perhaps a cure for cancer has been found? Nope. A nexus of dysgenic forces—corporate greed, mindless consumerism, voluntary childlessness, and sexual degeneracy—has led to the devolution of human culture. This process is hilariously (and vulgarly!) outlined in Idiocracy’s opening scenes:

Later, after being roused from his hibernation pod, Joe wanders into a nearby hospital. He quickly realizes that everything is now automated, and human knowledge and judgment have been effectively eliminated from medical care:

Indeed, the more people use AI, the less they are capable of managing even fairly simple tasks—a lesson that Joe soon learns in revolting fashion:

But this problem isn’t limited to unskilled workers. Finally, Joe is referred to the hospital’s physician Dr. Lexus (Justin Long), who sums up his condition as follows: “Uh, it says on your chart that you’re fucked up.” The scene plays for shock value, as Dr. Lexus expands on his diagnosis with a series of expletives and (by today’s standards, politically-incorrect) insults. And yet, a serious point is being made. While utterly helpful in his bedside manner, Dr. Lexus is proficient in two things—scanning the bar codes that are tattooed on each person’s arm and, in turn, invoicing patients for hospital visits. Hence, upon realizing that Joe has not been duly branded, Dr. Lexus is horrified. For he is now encountering something that lies outside of “the glass cage” of automation:

Needless to say, then, the society of the future depicted in Idiocracy is not flourishing. Through a series of misadventures, Joe eventually learns that agriculture has been ruined by corporate interests: the parent company of a sports drink named Brawndo has paid for governmental influence, so much so that Brawndo has come to replace water for the replenishment of lost fluid (hydration) and the irrigation of crops. Notably, however, Brawndo is not just foisted upon the American populace. Rather, a combination of pseudo-science and mass propaganda has convinced people that Brawndo is actually good for them. It’s a techno-pharmaceutical cure-all (“It’s got electrolytes!”) that can simultaneously improve human health and line investors’ pockets:

In the end, Joe is finally able to convince people that crops need water to grow. This “discovery” presses him into a crucial advisory role, and he soon ascends to the presidency. In his inaugural speech before Congress, Joe promises to make America great again:

It’s a bawdy ending to a bawdy movie. And yet, like any good satire, Idiocracy is not ridiculing the follies and vices of a fictional place. Rather, it is commenting on the contemporary socio-political order. In this regard, it provides more than a little grist for the critic’s mill, but I want to focus on the movie’s suggestion that AI will have a dysgenic impact on human development.

Or perhaps I should say: “is having.” Last month, the interdisciplinary journal Societies published an article called “AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking.” In this piece, Swiss scholar and political advisor Michael Gerlich explores how AI tool usage impacts critical thinking. Drawing on a variety of methods, including interviews and surveys, Gerlich determined that the biggest problem with AI is “cognitive offloading.” That is to say, people are increasingly relying on AI to handle informational processing tasks—a disburdening that Idiocracy anticipates during Joe’s visit to the hospital, when algorithmic decision-making frameworks and AI assistants are used to diagnose Joe’s “condition.” The hospital attendants struggle to engage in independent critical thinking and, in turn, are incapable of developing nuanced conclusions. Gerlich sees the same thing happening today:

The findings revealed a significant negative correlation between frequent AI tool usage and critical thinking abilities, mediated by increased cognitive offloading. … Furthermore, higher educational attainment was associated with better critical thinking skills, regardless of AI usage. These results highlight the potential cognitive costs of AI tool reliance.

Even more concerning, Gerlich adds, is the adverse effect that AI is having on young people. Since members of “Gen Z” are using chatbots and other AI software prior to, or in conjunction, with educational training, they are already exhibiting dependence on these tools. “Younger participants exhibited higher dependence on AI tools and lower critical thinking scores compared to older participants,” as Gerlich puts it. This conclusion raises significant longterm concerns about the expertise and judgment of future leaders and professionals.

Indeed, while Idiocracy envisions a society centuries in the future, the reality is that the time of Dr. Lexus may come sooner rather than later. Just a few weeks after Gerlich’s study was issued, The New York Times reported that the results of last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress indicate that the educational downturn that accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic has surprisingly accelerated:

The percentage of eighth graders who have “below basic” reading skills according to NAEP was the largest it has been in the exam’s three-decade history—33 percent. The percentage of fourth graders at “below basic” was the largest in 20 years, at 40 percent.

There was progress in math, but not enough to offset the losses of the pandemic.

Recent reading declines have cut across lines of race and class.

Experts, it seems, are puzzled. Sure, school closures during the pandemic are now widely considered to be a failed policy, but the NAEP test data reveals that other factors are also at play. What else, then, has appeared over the last decade or so that would disrupt the skill development of both young people and adults? Citing a leading expert, the Times puts it succinctly: “While we often look to classrooms to understand why students are not learning more, some of the causes may be attributed to screen time, cellphones and social media.”

Of course, it is not difficult to find links between the employment of AI tools, excessive screen time, and waning educational achievement. For example, it turns out that most people are using the generative AI chatbot named ChatGPT as a substitute for other digital platforms. So, if you like web browsing or playing games on your phone, ChatGPT can do that too, only with greater efficiency and enhanced interactivity. No wonder ChatGPT has seen staggering growth over the last year. Other tech corporations have taken notice: Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Twitter/X have all recently launched “AI assistants” on their own platforms. Using AI is now virtually inseparable from using the Internet itself. Moreover, the more human beings depend on AI, the more time they will spend on their screens—a correlation so certain that one company has already created software to help people cope with the arrival of “far more powerful and potentially disruptive” digital products. Our current dopamine hits will “feel like broccoli” in comparison with what is coming.

It’s neither bold nor particularly perceptive to say that these concerns will intensify in coming years. Even Microsoft, whose own AI chatbot known as “Copilot” now stalks my cursor whenever I open a Word document, just released a report noting that AI hinders critical thinking and promotes intellectual rigidity. Still, all is not lost: “GenAI helps knowledge workers scaffold complicated tasks and information; it helps knowledge workers automate artefact creation; and it helps form feedback cycles that knowledge workers otherwise do not have access to.” Yet, while these benefits may serve bureaucratic institutions (corporations and governments, above all), they will do so in inverse proportion to the analytical abilities of those who use them. They will succeed precisely by diminishing what human beings are capable of.

Notably, this tension between social flourishing on the one hand and corporate efficiency on the other has already exposed a rift in the second presidency of Donald J. Trump. In a recent column, The New York Times’ Ross Douthat observes that there is a “tech-populist tension” in Trump’s coalition. While MAGA hard-liners such as Steve Bannon continue to oppose “neoliberal globalism,” fearing a post-human, AI-driven future where “the elite aspires to a cyborg existence and machine intelligence makes ordinary human beings increasingly obsolete,” leaders of the “nascent tech right” such as Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel are thrilled with the prospect of slipping “free of both the ideological shackles imposed by woke progressivism and, more important, the regulatory shackles that the Biden administration wanted to impose on rapidly advancing frontier technologies, artificial intelligence above all.” For the time being, according to Douthat, Trump seems to be leaning towards the technogarchs, however modestly. And if this inclination proves true, it raises the curious specter of Bannon and Biden, MAGA and woke, working together to decelerate the emerging chatbot era. In the words of the ancient proverb: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” (Amicus meus, inimicus inimici mei).

For his own part, Douthat thinks that a détente remains possible within the Republican camp: “I still believe in some kind of synthesis—tech with trad, Muskian with Vancian, vaulting techno-futurism with a defense of humanism and the common man—as an alternative to existential conflict.” Yet, at this point, there’s more optimism than substance behind Douthat’s hoped-for “Golden Path.” He says that AI has to be “tamed, mastered, humanized,” but he does not indicate how. Perhaps that will come in a subsequent column, though, realistically, there are only so many options. Either “Big Tech” and AI will have to be curtailed through governmental intervention, as Herbert Marcuse suggested in his 1964 book One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Or these entities will have to be rejected by a small number of individuals who are willing to be marginalized in an increasingly post-human society, as both Søren Kierkegaard and Jacques Ellul anticipated.

But perhaps the latter choice won’t even materialize. After all, if AI minifies critical thinking, and if critical thinking is needed to prescind from the dominant culture, then the world of Idiocracy is already on our doorstep. History attests, and Idiocracy agrees, that governments and states are not so hard to buy off. Thus the time for individual resistance is now. So cancel your subscription to ChatGPT; “X out” of Microsoft Copilot; just say “no” to Brawndo. Your grandchildren will thank you.