Data makes societies less intelligent

More information is paradoxically making modern societies less intelligent, as the ability to distinguish signal from noise breaks down. The historical assumption that more data leads to better outcomes no longer holds in an era of information overload.

In the previous column, I argued that the artificial intelligence AI era will be defined less by access to technology than by what I called collective learning capacity. This is the continuous cycle through which organizations and societies detect signals, interpret them, decide on a course of action and learn from the results. I closed by suggesting that the first place this capacity is breaking down is also the most fundamental: the basic ability to tell signal from noise. In this column, I explore why, paradoxically, more information is currently making modern societies less, not more, intelligent. For most of human history, information was overwhelmingly scarce. The civilizations and institutions that gathered, preserved and transmitted data most effectively consistently outperformed those that did not. Our entire architecture of progress — from universities to corporate hierarchies — was built on the assumption that more information would naturally and inevitably produce better outcomes. The goal was always to acquire more. That assumption is now breaking. We generate more inf