Humanity has achieved much, but in doing so, it has lost something essential. The gap is now being filled — ineffectively — by increasingly expensive education.
In recent decades, societies have encountered a paradox: despite expanded access to education, information, and technology, the level of basic common sense — as subjectively observed — appears to be declining. This phenomenon cannot be fully explained by cultural or educational decay. Its roots lie in deeper structural shifts, most notably urbanization and the gradual removal of individuals from survival-related risk environments. The rise of generative AI does not reverse this loss; it may, in fact, deepen it.
Technological Progress, Humanism, and Urbanization Have Displaced Natural Selection
For most of human history, survival required continuous orientation toward reality — detecting threats, intuiting intentions, and solving practical problems. Common sense was not optional; it was an embedded cognitive strategy for adaptive response under uncertainty. Mistakes had direct consequences: death, loss, or social exclusion.
Urbanization dismantled many of these selection mechanisms. The modern urban individual operates in a shielded environment: climate-controlled spaces, guaranteed access to water, food delivery, protection from violence, and access to social goods largely decoupled from behavioral adequacy. In such conditions, behavioral incompetence is no longer punished — it is absorbed by institutional safety nets. Social selection has shifted toward symbolic capital, while basic common sense — defined as the capacity to make realistic decisions — has been steadily devalued.
The Information Bubble and the Rejection of Empiricism
Urban life also fosters cognitive insulation. People increasingly inhabit environments where the consequences of their errors in judgment are either invisible or deferred. One can disseminate falsehoods, adopt dysfunctional ideologies, and make uninformed decisions for years — without facing meaningful repercussions. Empirical testing of ideas is replaced by social reinforcement: if everyone else is doing it, it must be fine. Collective absence of judgment becomes undetectable because it is ubiquitous.
Cognitive Rent-Seeking
The advent of generative AI introduced a new form of cognitive inertia. Instead of using models to refine their understanding of reality, most users abdicate the cognitive burden entirely — no analysis, no verification, no alignment with context. The output is an endless stream of generated text, devoid of grounding, reflection, or intellectual effort.
A person who consistently outsources judgment loses the ability to think clearly, just as muscles atrophy without resistance. Generative tools substitute reasoning with answer retrieval, empiricism with probabilistic hallucination. In this context, AI is not an assistant but an intermediary between humans and the real world — an intermediary that further erodes causal reasoning.
Conclusion
The combination of urbanization and cognitive automation produces a society that appears hyperrational and technologically advanced — but is, in fact, increasingly incapable of adaptive response to crisis.
Common sense returns only when guarantees disappear. That may be the core lesson of history — and perhaps, of the future. ■