Just because some people may have had concerns about one thing that is not necessarily justified does not then mean that we can extrapolate concerns about new t

Just because some people may have had concerns about one thing that is not necessarily justified does not then mean that we can extrapolate concerns about new technology going forward to then be defacto unjustified. I'm not sure of the entire psycho-physiological effects that books had on society, but we can see many very real negatives that are very likely causally related with our new technological pursuits. For instance there have been sharp increases in all sorts of psychological disorders, physically people are becoming grossly unfit, fertility rates are plummeting among higher income, well educated, secular individuals. Less talked about issues are things such as a worldwide reversal of the Flynn Effect [1] in numerous developed nations. The Flynn effect is the observation that real IQ scores were increasing over time. IQ is normalized to always have a 100 mean with a standard deviation of about 15. But what Flynn found is that the mean 100 in e.g. 1920 was substantially higher than the one in e.g. 1900 and similarly moving forward. People were becoming 'smarter' over time, so much as IQ can measure. Sometime in the 1990s this trend began to reverse and quite sharply. IQ scores are dropping around the world by rates up to around 1.5 points per decade. This might not seem like much at first, but remember that a whole standard deviation is only 15 points. Imagine you are one standard deviation (15 points) ahead of the population. That means you are 'smarter' than 84% of people. Drop that just 1.5 points and you're down to only being ahead of 80% of the population. For that scale of change to be happening as a population level event, every decade, is really insane. It could be that these are all spurious correlations that have nothing at all to do with the rise of the internet, 24/7 digital tech, social media, and so forth. However, I think that the probability of that being the case is something very close to 0%. This will probably be a self correcting problem (many of these issues are going to correlate strongly against successful reproduction) but it'd be much more pleasant if we could resolve this without going full darwin on ourselves. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect