From brain-rotting videos to AI creep, every technological advance seems to make it harder to work, remember, think and function independently …
[…] The fundamental issue, Kosmyna says, is that as soon as a technology becomes available that makes our lives easier, we’re evolutionarily primed to use it. “Our brains love shortcuts, it’s in our nature. But your brain needs friction to learn. It needs to have a challenge.”
[…] We know, from our collective experience, that once you become accustomed to the hyperefficient cybersphere, the friction-filled real world feels harder to deal with. So you avoid phone calls, use self-checkouts, order everything from an app; you reach for your phone to do the maths sum you could do in your head, to check a fact before you have to dredge it up from memory, to input your destination on Google maps and travel from A to B on autopilot. Maybe you stop reading books because maintaining that kind of focus feels like friction; maybe you dream of owning a self-driving car.
[…] What is harder to dispute is that, with every technological advance, we deepen our dependence on digital devices and find it harder to work or remember or think or, frankly, function without them.
[…] Last year, “brain rot” was named Oxford University Press’s word of the year, a term that captures both the specific feeling of mindlessness that descends when we spend too much time scrolling through rubbish online and the corrosive, aggressively dumb content itself, the nonsense memes and AI garble. When we hold our phones we have, in theory, most of the world’s accumulated knowledge at our fingertips, so why do we spend so much time dragging our eyeballs over dreck?
One issue is that our digital devices have not been designed to help us think more efficiently and clearly; almost everything we encounter online has been designed to capture and monetise our attention. Each time you reach for your phone with the intention of completing a simple, discrete, potentially self-improving task, such as checking the news, your primitive hunter-gatherer brain confronts a multibillion-pound tech industry devoted to throwing you off course and holding your attention, no matter what.