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India Today
05-05-2025
- Science
- India Today
It is time for India to ban smartphones in schools and colleges like Finland has
First, it was all anecdotal. Over the years, as I have interacted with more and more people, I have come to believe — and I am using the word believe because this can also be construed as old-man-yells-at-moon — that young people seem to lack certain skills. And when I say skills, I am talking about work-related skills.I have noticed that, generally, young people are poor readers, not just of books but also anything that has printed text. They have difficulty with abstract ideas. They rarely notice subtext. They are mostly low on irony and sarcasm — likely because of their issues with subtext — and they struggle with problem-solving. Now, I am not throwing shade on Gen-Z and Millennials. They also have positive qualities in them, the kind of qualities that in certain cases, cover them in glory. But this piece is not about what Gen-Z and Millennials lack or what they have. Instead, it is about was anecdotal a few years ago is now increasingly turning empirical in 2025. Study after study reveals that people in the world, young and old alike, but the young in particular, are no longer that good with text, numbers, ideas and attention span. Some of these findings were recently covered by The Financial Times in an article titled 'Have humans passed peak brain power?' The article brings facts and figures to a feeling and notes that, since 2010, the cognitive decline among humans is real and not imagined. In general, we can no longer process numbers or read and comprehend in the same way as we used to do 30 to 40 years ago. Oddly, and encouragingly, The Financial Times article did not reach a conclusion that humans have biologically lost their mental faculties. Instead, it blamed the decline on the world we live in. 'The good news is that underlying human intellectual capacity is surely undimmed,' John Burn-Murdoch wrote in his piece. 'But outcomes are a function of both potential and execution. For too many of us, the digital environment is hampering the latter.'advertisementIn other words, our cognitive decline is the result of screen-time. Since 2010 — that is when smartphones arrived in the scene — it seems that screen-time has gone up and our ability to read text and numbers has come is probably the reason why countries have started taking note of smartphones and the havoc they seem to have been wrecking on people's minds. Given their ubiquity — and I must add a degree of usefulness — it is not possible for them to disappear from our lives. But countries have started limiting their usage wherever they can. Finland is the latest to do so. Its parliament passed a new law a few days ago, banning smartphone use in classrooms. The Netherlands is another country where similar rules exist. Italy, too, has done so and ditto for Brazil. At the same time, a number of countries have partial or conditional restrictions on smartphones in is high time India too comes out with a proper regulatory mechanism and guidelines to ban smartphones in schools. Ban — that word again which I dread. This necessitates that I must explain myself a bit.I do not want a ban on smartphones in schools and colleges because youngsters might use them to scroll through reels, or watch pornography, or share lascivious clips, or might use them to cheat in exams, or may end up playing violent video games, or might end up impacting their privacy because of the cameras and microphones in their phones. My reasons are not the reasons that one calls puritanical. I do not care about the prudishness or culture or 'corruption' of young minds. A ban is not even needed to keep children 'safe'. There are other ways to keep them safe. These are bad reasons to ban reason for suggesting a ban on smartphones is purely and plainly about what these devices are doing to our mental faculties. The world created by smartphones is a terrifying place for our brains. There is an information overload for which evolution hasn't wired us. It is this information — mostly junk and low-quality information — that led American writer John Naisbitt to quip decades ago, 'We are drowning in information, but are starved of knowledge.'Smartphones are increasingly leading to a world that Thomas Bernhard — the great hater as he was — presciently called 'stulted' at a time when smartphones did not even exist. Writing decades ago, Bernhard issued a warning against the primacy of images over text. 'The worldwide stultification was set in motion by photographic images and attained its present deadly momentum when the images began to move,' Bernhard wrote in Extinction. 'Humanity has for decades been staring brainlessly at these deadly photographic images and become more or less paralysed. Come the millennium, human beings will no longer be capable of thinking.'advertisementThe millennium has come, and while Bernhard is no longer alive to see the world he predicted, we increasingly get a sense that we are no longer thinking that sharply.A reversal is needed. Brought up feeding and feasting their eyes on screen, children and teens nowadays seem to be losing their sense of the world. And, of the word. Again, I am reminded of a few lines from a writer, although he wrote them in a different context. In Red Birds, Mohammed Hanif writes: 'Without their mobile phones and access to the internet, it was as if they were bats that had lost the use of their ears, and hence their ability to find things as they flew in the dark.'advertisementThis, I believe, is what has happened to all of us — and even more so to the generations that have grown up with small screens always attached to their hands. They are like bats that have lost the use of their ears and radar; now, each time they go out into the world, the noise, the light, and the chaos of it all render them immobile and dazed. They seem lost. We owe it to future generations that we give them the same skills that were given to us decades ago. Or else, we will be losing a little bit of that which made us dream big, create wonders and reshape our destinies.(Javed Anwer is Technology Editor, India Today Group Digital. Latent Space is a weekly column on tech, world, and everything in between. The name comes from the science of AI and to reflect it, Latent Space functions in the same way: by simplifying the world of tech and giving it a context)(Views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author)Must Watch
Irish Times
27-04-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Is mine the first generation thicker than our parents?
It may seem like a truism to suggest humanity is getting stupider. We achieved the incredible goal of making smoking almost extinct in the developed world, only to replace it with vaping. We pay €400 for tickets to a gig that were originally advertised at €86.50 and justify it to ourselves on the basis that the hours spent in the ticket seller's 'waiting room' would otherwise be wasted. Americans – or the 77,302,580 who voted for Donald Trump – elected a man who promised to bring down prices by imposing tariffs, which every sensible economist said would do the opposite. Now that he has actually gone ahead and done what he promised, with entirely predictable results, six in 10 are unhappy with both him and his tariffs. In Rome, pilgrims queue patiently for a fleeting glimpse of the body of the dead pope – and when the moment arrives, they lift their phones over their heads and crane their necks to experience it through a screen – which could have been achieved more easily by staying at home. But while this kind of self-defeating irrationality is hard-wired into humanity, the kind of stupidity I'm referring to is more intrinsic. READ MORE Teachers regularly sound warning bells about grade inflation and dumbing-down in education standards, but recent evidence suggests we've got much bigger problems than that. As John Burn-Murdoch, the Financial Times' chief data cruncher, puts it : 'Across a range of tests, the average person's ability to reason and solve novel problems appears to have peaked in the early 2010s and has been declining ever since.' Since it's not possible for our brains to have degraded in such a short space of time, attention has focused on Covid and school closures as the reason. But the trend is not just affecting schoolchildren. It's tempting to immediately blame the smartphone but the great mental slowdown was under way even before its arrival To be clear, this is precisely the opposite of what is supposed to happen. Just as every generation is slightly taller than the last, each is mentally sharper than their predecessors. James Flynn, the late American-born New Zealand-dwelling political scientist, found that from 1932 to 1978, average IQs rose by three points per decade. The 'Flynn effect' was never satisfactorily explained – it might have been better nutrition, access to education or the decline in childhood disease. But it's irrelevant now: the golden age of ever-increasing mental acuity seems to be over. Research from around the world – including from Norway, based on the results of IQ tests given to military conscripts ; and from US studies of 'composite ability scores' in adults – indicates a 'reverse Flynn effect'. My generation may be the first to be more stupid than my parents – and my children's generation may be thicker than mine. The Norwegian research found that the IQ of male conscripts rose six points between 1959 and 1979; two points the following decade; 1.3 points the one after, before declining by 1.3 points. In 2009, Flynn discovered tests carried out in 1980 and again in 2008 show that the IQ score of an average 14-year-old dropped by more than two points . And Burn-Murdoch drew his conclusions partly from latest round of analysis from PISA, the OECD's international benchmarking test for academic performance by 15-year-olds. It's tempting to immediately blame the smartphone – I'm loath to rule out blaming it for pretty much anything – but the great mental slowdown was under way even before its arrival. One theory suggests that because we are living longer and working memory declines with age, it might simply be a side effect of an ageing society. A more plausible explanation focuses on the way we process information generally. In the early years of the internet, we spent less time online overall, and more of that time engrossed in single topics or communicating directly with people we know. These days, we have morphed into dumb, passive consumers of 'the feed', an endless scroll of snatches of information and images unrelated to each other: someone's Penney's haul; puppies in need of rescuing; a haunted-looking child carrying the body of another child tightly wrapped in a white sheet in Gaza; Holly Willoughby flogging hair dye. Our brains are not designed to cope with information fired randomly in our direction like peas from a toddler's high chair. This is where the research – much of it collated in Johann Hari's book Stolen Focus (which was both feted and criticised when it was published but offers interesting food for thought) – gets pretty convincing, at least to anyone who has spent time in an office. Consider the following: if you're interrupted while in the middle of a complex task, it takes 23 minutes to get back to the task. We get less than one hour a day of uninterrupted time at work and can expect to be distracted on average every three to 11 minutes . The phrase 'multitasking' is meaningless for humans, but we convince ourselves we're doing it. The answer seems to be that we either accept that humanity has reached the point of obsolescence and hand over to AI – a suggestion some in Silicon Valley take quite literally, as Mark O'Connell writes this weekend. Or we finally take seriously all the research on the negative impacts of technology and resolve to meaningfully regulate big tech's influence over our lives. We need systemic solutions, but we can't wait for them either – the answer is in your own hands (for an average of 4.5 hours a day anyway, according to Comreg's 2022 data on smartphone usage). Technology's relentless assault on our ability to focus is just one of eight causes Hari highlights – the others include stress, exhaustion and the collapse in sustained reading. But it is hard to argue with the impact of technology on our ability to think, because we have all experienced it. If you're reading this on a phone, it's a minor miracle you're still here.
Time of India
26-04-2025
- Time of India
AI, and the cost of ‘optimised' learning
In a course I teach at a liberal arts university, I asked students to write a reflective essay about a personal cultural experience that changed them. What I got back was unsettling — far too many reflective pieces had the polished, impersonal sheen of AI. The sentences were smooth, the tone perfectly inoffensive, but missing the raw, uneven edges of real student writing. When I asked a few of them about their process, some admitted using AI tools like ChatGPT as a 'starting point,' others as an 'editor,' and a few simply shrugged, 'It gave me the answer.' The underlying sentiment was clear: why struggle when you can get it done by AI? (Photo credit: Getty Images) Not just in my classroom Professors everywhere are facing a generation of students who carry instant 'answers' in their pockets, bypassing the struggle that deep thinking, reflection and real learning demand. AI isn't just helping with assignments anymore — it's writing discussion posts, solving problem sets, even drafting essays before class. What we're seeing is not just a technological shift — it's a cultural one. But what do we make of this shift — from thinking, to outsourcing thought? Since 2012, standardised assessments across high-income countries have revealed a troubling phenomenon: a measurable decline in reasoning and problem-solving abilities among young adults. The data is stark: 25% of adults in developed economies, and a staggering 35% in the US, now struggle with basic mathematical reasoning. According to Financial Times journalist John Burn-Murdoch's piercing analysis, 'Have Humans Passed Peak Brain Power?', this decline is not due to biology, nor environment. It's something more insidious: it's due to how technology is reshaping our cognitive capacities. Where once we immersed ourselves in deep reading and reflective analysis, we now live in the age of the scroll. Algorithmically curated feeds dictate our attention, fragmenting our thoughts into 280-character conclusions and ten-second clips. Fewer than half of Americans read a single book in 2022. This isn't just a change in habit; it's a shift in the architecture of our cognition. We are witnessing a silent, collective decline of attention span, memory, and conceptual depth. And this crisis is now bleeding into education. Gyankunj Case These concerns are not limited to elite university campuses. In a study that I conducted with my professor and a colleague in Gujarat, evaluating the Gyankunj program — a flagship initiative to integrate technology into govt school classrooms — we found that students exposed to smartboards and digital content actually fared worse in mathematics and writing compared to their peers in classrooms without digital tools. The reasons were sobering. Teachers had not been adequately trained in using these technologies. Mathematics, which requires cognitive scaffolding and immediate feedback, suffered because the teacher was reduced to a passive facilitator of pre-designed content. Writing, an intensely human process involving revisions, suggestions, and encouragement, became mechanical. What we observed was not enhanced learning, but the opposite — a disconnect between medium and method. This points to a deeper malaise: techno-optimism. There's a growing belief, often fuelled by venture capital and consultancy jargon, that algorithms can fix education. That AI tutors, avatars, and dashboards can replace the 'inefficiencies' of human teaching. That every child's mind can be optimised, like a logistics chain. Learning Is Human But pedagogy is not content delivery. It is a relational, embodied, and context-rich process. It depends on trust, dialogue, spontaneity, eye contact, missteps and encouragement. No AI system, no matter how sophisticated, can replicate the chemistry of a teacher who senses a student's confusion and adapts — not by code, but by care. AI is now entering primary education spaces as well. I have seen prototypes where storybooks are narrated by AI voices, children's drawings are corrected by algorithms and writing prompts are generated automatically. But what happens to play-based learning? To dirtying one's hands with clay, engaging with textures, shapes, and emotions? Indian educators like Gandhi, Tagore, and Gijubhai Badheka emphasised the necessity of experiential, tactile learning in early years. Similarly, Sri Aurobindo emphasised that education must arise from the svabhava of the child, guided by the inner being — not imposed templates. Can an algorithm, however sophisticated, grasp this uniqueness? J Krishnamurti, in his talks on education, famously questioned whether any system, however well-designed, could ever nurture freedom. For him, true learning happened in freedom from fear, not in efficient content delivery. If AI's omnipresence in classrooms creates an atmosphere where mistakes are quickly corrected, paths auto-completed, and creativity constrained by what's already been done, are we not curbing the learner's inward growth? In reducing learning to clicks, nudges, and 'correct answers', are we not slowly extinguishing the inner flame? Walking the Tightrope And yet — let me be clear — I am neither a techno-skeptic nor a techno-romantic. The use of AI in education, when done thoughtfully, has made certain forms of learning more accessible and visual. Diagrams, simulations, and language-support systems have helped many students grasp complex ideas. It can assist teachers in planning. It can support students with special needs. But it should remain a tool, never the foundation. A servant of learning, not its substitute. When we raise children in screen-first environments, we risk creating what Jonathan Haidt (2024) now identifies as an anxious generation: digitally fluent but emotionally fragmented, constantly grappling with overexposure to screens, metrics, and digital surveillance. So, we have to ask: Are we preparing students not to be wiser, but simply more optimised? Not more reflective, but more 'prompt ready'? Not more social, but increasingly isolated behind screens and 'smart' interfaces? The challenge ahead is not technological. It is existential. Will we nurture depth, or distraction? Freedom, or feedback loops? A sense of self, or a sense of being constantly scored? Facebook Twitter Linkedin Email Disclaimer Views expressed above are the author's own.
Gulf Insider
21-03-2025
- Science
- Gulf Insider
Idiocracy Looms As Study Finds TikTok Rots Youth Minds
The intelligence test was invented 121 years ago. While IQ scores have historically risen alongside technological advancements, recent years have seen a slowdown—if not a reversal—in intelligence. The rise of smartphones, tablets, and social media may be to blame, and more recently, the phenomenon of the 'TikTok brain' among teenagers suggests peak cognition has arrived. A new report from the Financial Times cites a test used to measure the IQs of 15-year-olds, conducted by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). This test evaluates students' performance in reading, mathematics, and science literacy. The latest data suggests that IQs peaked in the early 2010s. Peak cognition fears come nearly two decades after the debut of the satirical sci-fi comedy Idiocracy, which depicted a dystopian future where humanity becomes profoundly dumbed down by the 2500s. FT's chief data reporter, John Burn-Murdoch , said the timing of this data marks an 'inflection point' and is 'noteworthy' because it coincides with 'our changing relationship with information,' which is now primarily online. NEW 🧵: Is human intelligence starting to decline?Recent results from major international tests show that the average person's capacity to process information, use reasoning and solve novel problems has been falling since around the mid should we make of this? — John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) March 14, 2025 Declining math and literacy skills are likely the result of a shift away from text-based learning toward visual media. Additionally, there is a broader erosion in the capacity for mental focus, which could be attributed to 'TikTok brain rot'—with youth spending countless hours each week mindlessly swiping into oblivion. It's clear that digital technologies have impacted attention span, memory, and self-regulation negatively. A surge in the share of 15-year-olds who reported difficulties in PISA tests coincides with big changes in how information is processed, shifting drastically away from reading to visual content over the two decades. Peak cognition fears suggest achieving full Idiocracy may happen at a much more accelerated timeline. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence could surpass human IQs by the next decade… 'I think today's systems, they're very passive, but there's still a lot of things they can't do. But I think over the next five to 10 years, a lot of those capabilities will start coming to the fore and we'll start moving towards what we call artificial general intelligence,' Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis said at a briefing on Monday. TikTok and other digital technologies that offer instant gratification through swiping left, right, up, or down appear to have made society even dumber.
New York Times
06-03-2025
- Business
- New York Times
Premier League's aggregate revenue almost as much as that of La Liga and Bundesliga combined
The Premier League's aggregate revenue is now almost double what the Spanish and German top flights earn in a season, according to UEFA's latest annual European Club Finance and Investment Landscape report, with the gap still growing. The 49-page report, which was published late on Thursday, is based on the audited accounts for 2023 from 745 top-flight clubs in UEFA's 55 member associations, making it the most comprehensive study of its kind. Advertisement Packed with graphs and tables, the report paints a picture of a complex but resilient industry that is making more money than ever before, largely thanks to booming attendances and record commercial revenues, but is spending it just as fast. Nowhere is that story more true than in England, where the Premier League continues to lead the way in almost every metric, good and bad. Overall, Europe's top-division clubs combined to earn £22.4billion ($28.9bn), with the Premier League accounting for £6bn ($7.7bn) of that total, almost as much as the second and third highest earning leagues, La Liga and the Bundesliga, combined. The Premier League's total revenue grew 11 per cent year-on-year, a similar rate to Spain and Germany but less than the improvements made by Serie A and Ligue 1, although UEFA believes England's top division stretched further ahead in 2024 and will continue to do so this year, as its broadcast revenues are still growing while the rest of Europe stands still or falls back. One of the main takeaways from the report is the growing might of the Premier League's middle class. The median club's revenue in England is now over £200million ($260m), 60 per cent greater than a comparable club in Germany and three times what a mid-table side in Italy or Spain is earning. This enables mid-ranking Premier League sides to massively outspend top teams elsewhere. The median club in England is spending over £150m in total wages ($200m) and multiples of that on transfer fees. As the report notes, Chelsea spent almost €2billion (£1.7bn, $2.2bn) on players between 2019 and 2024, with last year's squad costing a record £1.4bn ($1.8bn), £250m more than the previous record set by Real Madrid in 2020. This enormous outlay on players, coupled with an overall club wage bill of £330m, will make it very hard for Chelsea to meet UEFA's squad-cost limit, which is set at 80 per cent of each club's turnover this season, before dropping to 70 per cent next season. Chelsea earned about £430m last year. Advertisement But the west London-based club were just one of four English sides to have squads in 2024 that cost more than €1bn to assemble, with Manchester City, Manchester United and Arsenal clearing that bar. West Ham spent half that amount but it was still more than Barcelona, AC Milan and Atletico Madrid spent on their squads. This finding, and many others like it, reinforce a point that was made by the Financial Times' chief data report John Burn-Murdoch during the British newspaper's Business of Football Summit last week, when he said 'not so long ago, the eighth best team in England used to be the 80th best team in Europe, in terms of on-pitch performance - now it's the 20th best'. However, all that spending on transfer fees and wages is not ideal for profitability, and the report also documents how the Premier League leads the way in annual losses, debt levels and interest costs. 'While most clubs appear to be managing player wage increases responsibly, other costs are rising rapidly, putting greater pressure on operating margins than ever before,' is how UEFA president Aleksander Ceferin describes the wider scene in his foreword to the report. 'Clubs must remain vigilant as considerable work still needs to be done to restore pre-pandemic profitability.' In previous years, UEFA's landscape report has been quick to identify new trends in the game, such as the rise of multi-club groups or private-equity investment in clubs. Both of those trends continued in 2023 and 2024 but at a reduced rate as the overall number of takeovers halved from 2021 and 2022. Whether this suggests the smart money sees trouble ahead is unclear but the report does note that the game's burgeoning commercial income is not making the clubs more profitable, as they have all hired more non-playing staff, leading to higher overall wage bills. Advertisement The report also makes it clear that while match-day attendances are very healthy, broadcast income is largely flat, with the Premier League being the outlier. But UEFA's bean-counters are always keen to praise good practice when they see it and they highlight the growth Manchester City have enjoyed since 2009, when they were ranked 22nd in the European revenue stakes, with earnings of about £85m, a figure that has now jumped to £715m ($920m), second only to Real Madrid. Key to this rise up the money list has been Manchester City's burgeoning commercial income, leaping from £24m in 2009, the year after the club was bought by Abu Dhabi royal Sheikh Mansour, to almost £350m last year. However, there is still room for improvement in east Manchester as the report explains that 'kit and merchandising' income is a better 'proxy for each individual club's global fan base', and in this metric the defending champions make half as much as Liverpool and Manchester United, and also trail Arsenal, Tottenham Hotspur and Chelsea. The report also has gentle warnings for Aston Villa, as its wage-to-turnover ratio is an alarming 91 per cent, and the Premier League more generally, as 16 of its 20 clubs posted pre-tax losses in 2023, with more red ink expected in 2024, if the early returns from loss-making Chelsea, Aston Villa, Liverpool, Manchester United and Spurs are any guide. But with broadcast income from UEFA's revamped competitions on the up, buoyant foreign media sales, full houses and global sponsors throwing money their way, the Premier League's big-spenders do not look like they intend to cut up their credit cards just yet. GO DEEPER La Liga boss Tebas accuses City of trying to circumvent financial rules (Crystal Pix/)
