The announcement this week by Andy Burnham of a new National Centre for Information Defence (NCID) marks an important change in how we think about security and a potentially radical shift towards what I call ‘cognitive rearmament’.
The background to this shift is a dawning realisation that cognitive security can’t be taken for granted. Most would agree that happy and healthy societies depend on people who can think for themselves. Workers who can solve problems. Citizens who can use their votes wisely and can spot lies and deception. Parents who know how to look after their children.
During the last century, there were good reasons to believe that exactly these types of cognitive capacity were improving. IQ was rising, education had become universal, university participation expanded vastly. The world’s science systems were becoming ever more sophisticated and at the end of the century, the Internet opened up all of human knowledge.
Now, however, while vast sums of money are being spent on AI, which is achieving dramatic improvements in machine analysis and reasoning, there are glaring signs of cognitive regression among people, an unhappy combination of ever-smarter machines and possibly dumber humans who are easier to manipulate.
IQ levels began to reverse at the beginning of this century in some of the richest countries, including the UK, Germany and Denmark. The PISA scores measuring school children’s levels of attainment peaked in 2012 and then started to decline, with sharp falls in reading, maths and science.
The annual Monitoring the Future study in the US found a significant rise in the proportion of 18-year-olds who struggle to concentrate or learn new things, while 25% of adults in high-income countries (and 35% in the US) are now unable to use “mathematical reasoning when reviewing and evaluating the validity of statements”.
These patterns have coincided with declines in everyday civility, including a willingness to listen and learn. In the US, a majority now believe their fellow citizens to be morally bad, which may explain why people move so fast towards angry intolerance.
With this regression come new threats. The spread of misinformation on social media platforms has been well-documented. Large proportions of the population now believe claims – on crime or migration in particular – which are the opposite of the truth.
Meanwhile, cognitive warfare has become a higher priority for states. Russia’s budget for cognitive warfare has been estimated at $2bn, while China’s is near $10bn. The 20th National Congress in 2022 announced an expansion of the “study and mastery of the characteristics and laws of information based and intelligent warfare” with the brain described as a priority for People’s Liberation Army investment and as the “main battlefield” of future warfare. In 2024, after floods killed over 200 people in Valencia, a Chinese operation posing as a Spanish human rights NGO circulated calls for the government to be overthrown.
These moves have prompted responses: Sweden established a psychological defence agency, France created VIGINUM in the office of the prime minister and Moldova set up a Centre for Strategic Communication and Combating Disinformation. The UK has at last caught up with the announcement of NCID.
Yet most countries have been slow to realise just how threatened they are by the weaponisation of collective stupidity, and even slower to understand the parallel effects of the big technology platforms which have incentives to lock populations into addictive, compulsive behaviours, and to undermine their ability to agree on effective laws, regulations or taxes.
In response, our societies urgently need to commit themselves to cognitive rearmament. That will require new institutions and capabilities for defence. But the task goes much wider. It requires nations to put a far higher premium on skills to spot lies, deceptions and manipulations, and to understand multiple points of view, rather than jumping to simplistic but wrong interpretations of events. It means rethinking defence to include both technological capabilities and in-depth strength in the population.
That process of developing robust critical thinking skills needs to start early, in primary school. Finland is a trailblazer and has for several years ensured that young people learn about disinformation. Denmark has done the same. But education is just as important for the adult population and should become a primary duty of public broadcasters.
We also urgently need new institutions to guard against the deepfakes that can easily disrupt elections, and new laws to promote truth and discourage industrial-scale lying. There is much to build on, including courts that see it as their primary duty to ‘ascertain the truth by the best evidence available’, consumer laws which already punish misleading and false advertising claims and the beginnings of serious action to strengthen truth in politics (such as Wales’ 2026 law banning lies in political communication).
Many democracies tried in the past to resist subversion and manipulation. Ancient Athens even subsidised access to the theatre to help citizens gain the skills needed to take part in shared decision-making. Mass education became a priority across the world in the 19th century, from Kerala to Scandinavia, which pioneered extensive adult education – cognitive infrastructures that helped enable the region’s extraordinary social and economic success in the 20th century.
Comparable ambition will be needed everywhere in the 21st century to ensure populations have the skills needed to navigate a world of ubiquitous smart technologies trained on every detail of human psychology, and to spot verbal and visual lies and manipulations.
Taking cognitive rearmament seriously matters for social and political reasons. But it also has obvious economic consequences. Improving cognitive capacity among older people is essential for economic growth, in the many countries with rapidly ageing populations that need to keep a growing army of the over-50s productive. Reversing cognitive decay among young people is equally essential for prospects of future growth.
Meanwhile, new industries will likely emerge around cognitive defence, with plenty of export potential – as every nation comes to realise that cognitive resilience is essential to future security and prosperity. For a precedent, just look at how rising cyberattacks and cybercrime spawned the vast cyber security industry. As defence spending increasingly covers not just drones and missiles but also these less tangible forms of defence and attack, new sectors are bound to grow.
For now, it remains unclear which nations have the foresight and courage to understand the new world we are in – a world which is being rapidly transformed by AI, in which new landscapes of cognitive vulnerability are becoming decisive.
Those that watch these developments passively will look as foolish as nations in past eras that failed to grasp that their old castles and walls, cavalry and cannons, had been rendered obsolete.
Geoff Mulgan is the author of Collective Stupidity, forthcoming from Princeton University Press
