Scroll through any café, commute, or classroom, and the answer has been similar, where the heads are bent, thumbs are scrolling. It’s tempting to conclude that technology is making us dumber, lazier, or dangerously dependent. But that conclusion is too simple—and too comfortable. The real question isn’t whether technology is making us smarter or more dependent, but what kind of intelligence it is reshaping, and at what cost.
Machines have also replaced our memory and their navigation, calculation, and even the ability to make decisions. The memorized numbers that were accessed on the phone before are now stored on cloud servers. GPS tells us where to turn. The reason is that search engines give answers to inquiries prior to our actual realisation. Such is the result of this digital addiction, maintain critics, the sucking dry of intellectual potential and glorification of thoughtless, shallow thought.
Trade-Off Rarely Acknowledged
Every major past technology has transformed the ways humans think. Writing negatively affected the oral memory but broadened the generation of knowledge. The reduction of mental arithmetic enables sophisticated engineering by calculators. The internet is no different. What’s new is scale and speed. We have never had so concrete an instrument in the thought of daily life as motives so suited to constant movement.
Technology does not reduce intelligence itself; it only takes it out of the way. We do not store information, but remember where to find information. We gain more and more in speed, as opposed to profundity, of reaction as opposed to reflection. It is a paradigm shift that is biased towards a few particular abilities: pattern recognition, synthesis, and adaptability. It also isolates others: the concentration on short and long-term actions, to read well, and to think.
It is not the fact that we are reliant on technology. Depending is not always negative; human beings have been relying on tools. The implicit threat is addiction. The moment when we no longer care which of them we are losing, the moment when appliances are permitted to make up our thoughts instead of serving us.
Illusion of Efficiency
Efficiency is technology, and efficiency of what? We are learning more and more, but we fear less. We scroll screens and tabs, and scroll past headlines. Digital technologies reward short-term and emotional responsiveness, not subtlety. This ultimately conditions the brain, psychologically, to be disjointed.
The research papers on the digital dependency effects show that this constant multitasking reduces working memory and concentration. More importantly, however, it changes our attitude towards problems. Instead of addressing uncertainty, we seek short-term answers. We do not sit down and meet the complexity, but dissect it into terms to be searched.
Here, the question arises: Does technology reduce intelligence? Becomes distorted. The point is that intelligence is not being reduced, but it is being retrained. And the school ethos is friendly to participation, not learning.
Dependency Is a Choice.
It’s easy to frame technology technology-dependent society as a personal failure: weak discipline, poor habits, lack of willpower. This ignores how deliberately systems are designed. Platforms monetize attention. Algorithms learn what keeps us scrolling. Notifications interrupt thought by default. Dependency isn’t accidental; it’s profitable.
But acknowledging this doesn’t mean helplessness. It means responsibility shifts from moral panic to conscious design—both at the societal level and the individual one. We need technologies that support depth, not just speed.
It is easy to illustrate the concept of a technology-dependent society with a pillar of support to lean on, which makes it a personal failure, bad habits, no discipline, and no willpower. This lacks consideration of the design of systems. The attention is monetized on the platform. Algorithms learn what keeps us scrolling. Notification default is an infringement of thought. The addiction is never accidental, but profitable.
It does not assume a lack of knowledge, but it is important to recognize that. That means that the phenomenon of moral panic is substituted with the conscious design of society and that of personality. We shall need individuals to be patient enough to be bored, and to be silent and scolding when really we have to think.
The Question That Matters More
So do we become smarter or more addicted because of technology? The honest answer is: both. It increases our functions, alters our habits of thought, without our awareness. It can make us more informed, more interdependent, more innovative- but also more distracted, more responsive, and less reflexive.
What is of interest is not the question of the impact of technology with regard to intelligence; we are worried about the way we treat work. Or, do we want to think when it is unthinkable to think? More difficult to forget when it is more difficult? To choose seriousness in a world that has been falsified to be entertaining?
The technology tends to upgrade constantly. This variable cannot be controlled. We have the option always either to remain active participants in our own cognition or to be slowly transformed to become operators of tools to think on our behalf.
Intelligence deals with our manner of attendance, inquiry, and the extent to which we interact with the world. In case we lose it, we might not be able to save ourselves from smart technology.
