Opinion Remember the way to the restaurant? How transformative technology may dumb us down as a species

Thus, science shows unequivocally that experience is essential for the brain to evolve its capabilities in diverse respects, from sensory perception and motor coordination to remembering things and making complex decisions. It also showed that failure to use these capabilities regularly can lead to the shutting down of entire brain regions. So, what’s my point? That we should pause and ponder on how the takeover of our lives by digital applications, which have totally disrupted the way our brains interact with the environment, might shape our brains and, ultimately, our capabilities. This thought was triggered by a recent dinner. It was at a restaurant I had gone to several times but I had begun to rely on Google Maps to guide me. The directions being proposed on this occasion were clearly absurd, taking me through narrow residential streets that I had never driven through before. But I felt compelled to follow those directions and, at one point, I found myself totally lost. And then I remembered another ability I had lost: To recall phone numbers of even my closest family members (embarrassingly, including my wife). It seemed that my cognitive abilities to navigate spaces and remember things had been seriously impaired and this was unrelated to ageing. I wondered if these losses might be attributable to my growing dependence on digital apps supposedly designed to make my life easier.

The science of brain plasticity is showing that we are, in fact, losing a range of abilities, not just spatial orientation and navigation, but the ability to remember things and concentrate (no wonder newspaper reading is collapsing worldwide, especially in young people who were born into the digital age and whose brains never even had a chance to evolve the abilities I was fortunate to develop), and even our abilities to interact with other humans, regulate our emotions and plan for the future. As one example, habitual reliance on GPS navigation decreases activity in the brain’s centres responsible for spatial memory and navigation. Psychological science is demonstrating that our shrinking attention spans, catalysed by the rapid-fire bursts of short text and images on social media platforms, are profoundly affecting our social behaviours, rendering us less likely to make or stick to plans, make real-life commitments and to engage with other humans. And thus, the greatest paradox of our times: While the internet supposedly helped connect humanity, it was also associated with an epidemic of loneliness.

These cumulative losses manifest in many ways, not least a deterioration in our mental health that has led governments around the world to impose strict regulations on internet use and, in particular, social media, for children and adolescents, whose brains are the most plastic. But now, with the advent of large language models (LLMs) and generative AI, our most sophisticated capabilities to search for information, to synthesise it and to write are gradually being delegated to machines. Even more insidious is how conversational agents are replacing the need for interacting with real humans, offering easy pathways to engage in meaningful encounters that never disappoint you. What might this do to the essential skills that young people need to learn which enable them to establish long-term relationships? As the world wakes up to the spectre of unprecedented population decline, we should be even more worried about how AI may lead to fewer intimate relationships in the future.

It may well be that the generation of humans born in the new millennium will be distinguished from our ancestors in fundamental ways, with virtually no ability to map the world, remember basic information, synthesise knowledge and arrive at a decision. If these are the very features which distinguish us from our closest cousins in the animal kingdom, then will our brains wither to the extent that we will cease to be human? Contrary to the hype which accompanied the arrival of these transformative technologies as empowering humans, they may well become our enslavers. Indeed, while the AI doomsday prophets focus on technology overtaking humanity through undermining democracy and becoming completely autonomous, I fear that AI will overwhelm humanity by rendering us incapable of doing the most mundane tasks, gradually dumbing us down in perpetuity.

In the absence of any policy interventions to protect humankind from the perils of these technologies, it is up to each of us to do what we can. My resolution, then, is to be mindful of how and when I use digital apps (thankfully, some protective instinct had already ensured that I never acquired a social media presence). If I can muster the willpower, I may even switch off the internet connection on my phone until I really need it. In the end, that might well be the only way to preserve the essence of what makes us human.

The writer is the Paul Farmer Professor of Global Health at Harvard Medical School