We have always been dumb. Its just that so much status signalling happens around intelligence that we forget how dumb we are.
See Theory of Bounded Rationality which won a nobel prize.
It was born out of asking a simple question - if all the leaders and institutions during WW2 had experienced the horrors of WW1 how come they failed at preventing WW2?
And the answer is there are limits to what humans can do.
Its not about what its doing well. Its about what and where it screws up. The older you get you stop extrapolating from what you see any tool doing in the demo or marketing ppt or the first month. Just as with people. This is why we have probation periods for employee. It takes Time to see how they handle all the unpredictability. There will be screw ups. And then you write your blog post.
More complex a system gets, more issues it has. Never less.
As Lynn Margulis reminded us we are not the main show. Our individual intelligence is highly over rated. The brain itself is kludge upon kludge accumulating over thousands of years, to solve problems that keep changing with time and environmental changes. Its quite a piece of crap actually if you tabulate all the accumulated junk. We arent as interesting as we think we are.
Some of the tech and knowledge generated might be interesting. But compare it with to photosynthesis or butterfly metamorphosis or the fact that microbes can double their population in a few hours, all of which is happening without needing any human intelligence. So they may very well be watching but are more curious about a rose or a redwood tree than all the random and superficial activity the chimp brain produces.
So you think reality is static and not an ever growing ever changing process?