Has innovation over the years led to a drop in overall intelligence?

Yes, with more access to technology the internet has become more prominent and as such so has cheating and just quick looking up of answers instead of truly understanding it.

	Deviant Audio -  4002 pts -  (3 years ago)
	I'm not even referring to just internet and whatnot. You're completely right though.

	Nagare -  1615 pts -  (3 years ago)
	Yeah but it is a major leader in our increased stupidity :D And lack of motivation because most areas have grown even more materialistic.

No, complacency has led to a lack of intelligence.
That would have happened without innovation.

Yes, definitely, technology has made so many people very lazy. People don't think for themselves anymore, they let the technology tell them what to think.

I was listening to a science show the other day. The eggheads said that the human brain is smaller now than it was 10000 years ago. Asked if this meant that people were growing stupider, the scientists said that there was no real way to tell. I think that some may be smarter than ever before, but overall, we are growing stupider. And lazier too. The two may be interconnected.

I just think that people are absorbing useless, semantic facts more than they are encoding pragmatic, applicable knowledge. People remember numerous songs that they like, sports teams, vintage vehicle models, gossip, and all kinds of other things that are essentially useless, compared to things that can be used in a global economy. This is not to say that we should do away with these things, but we need to discourage people from being so submerged in things like that, or our industrialized prosperity will not last.