> The problem we should be focused on is how dumb people are getting (or have been for all of eternity)

Over the arc of time, I’m not sure that an accurate characterization is that humans have been getting dumber and dumber. If that were true, we must have been super geniuses 3000 years ago!

I think what is true is that the human condition and age old questions are still with us and we’re still on the path to trying to figure out ourselves and the cosmos.

Majority of us are meme-copying automatons who are easily pwned by LLMs. Few of us have learned to exercise critical thinking and understanding from the first assumptions - the kind of thing we are expected to be learn in schools - also the kind of thing that still separates us from machines. A charitable view is that there is a spectrum in there. Now, with AI and social media, there will be an acceleration of this movement to the stupid end of the spectrum.

> That seems uniquely human but I'm not a ethnobiologist.

In my opinion, this is a uniquely human thing because we're smart enough to develop technologies with planet-level impact, but we aren't smart enough to use them well. Other animals are less intelligent, but for this very reason, they lack the ability to do self-harm on the same scale as we can.

Isn't defining what should not be done by anyone a problem that laws (as in legislation) are for? Though, it's not that I expect that those laws would come in time.