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Home / Opinion / Columns /  Will technology turn human beings intellectually
lazy?
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WILL TECHNOLOGY TURN HUMAN BEINGS INTELLECTUALLY LAZY?

3 min read . Updated: 26 Jan 2023, 12:58 AM IST Biju Dominic Premium Photo:
iStock

We will need lifelong learning to avert the fate of the sea squirt that devours
its own brain once it settles down

Read Full Story


There was a time when memorizing multiplication tables, phone numbers and
landmarks along a journey route counted as essential life skills. Then
calculators, smartphones and Google Maps took charge of those traditional
functions of the human brain. Today’s trends are very clear. As technology makes
rapid progress, more human tasks will be taken over by digital technology. Now,
with the introduction of ChatGPT , OpenAI’s chatbot that uses artificial
intelligence (AI), several big questions are brewing. Which human functions will
it consume? With the human brain having even fewer tasks to perform, will mental
inactivity lead to intellectual laziness?



The sea squirt is a tiny marine creature with an odd lifestyle. It starts life
swimming with the aid of a brain and nervous system, but, after attaching itself
to its permanent home, it digests these now-superfluous organs and leads a
vegetable-like existence. The sea squirt reminds us what our brains have evolved
for: to orchestrate and express active movement. Those adapting to a
couch-potato lifestyle will lose brain power. Will advances in AI cause this
tragedy of organ inactivity among humans?

As an agricultural economy gave way to an industrial economy, and as machines
took away much of the manual work, people became less physically active.
Sedentary lifestyles led to a worldwide epidemic of obesity. But then luckily,
the knowledge economy took off. In this economy, human brains have been highly
active. So although the physical body was not as active as during the
agricultural or industrial era, intense brain activity was still burning up
plenty of calories. But today, in an emerging economy based on AI, not just the
human body, even the human brain could be rendered less active than before. So,
are humans at risk of facing both physical and intellectual obesity at the same
time?



In the past, our obesity problem due to lack of physical activity was
accentuated by the arrival of junk food. Similarly, the emerging inactivity of
the brain has been supplemented by a tremendous increase in the time that
humans, especially younger generations, are spending on online games and
pornography. The video game industry was worth nearly $200 billion in 2021 in
the US—more than its music, book publishing and sports businesses combined. A
survey released by US security company Netskope reveals that consumption of
pornographic content grew 600% in the first half of 2020 compared to the same
period the previous year. This pandemic-induced behavioural trend looks set to
continue.

One of the measures of human intelligence is called the Flynn Effect. It refers
to the observed rise in standardized intelligence test scores over a span of
time. This increase was found to be continuous and roughly linear from the early
days of such intelligence testing to the mid-1990s across the world. But some
recent studies show that the increase in the Flynn Effect in developed countries
is no longer as fast as it was. A new study recently published in the journal
Nature finds that since 1945, there has been a dramatic drop in the number of
papers and patents that are likely to break with the past in ways that push
science and technology in new directions.

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This suggests increasing intellectual laziness among scientists and a tendency
to seek incrementalism over intellectual leaps. Are the slowing down of the
Flynn Effect and drop in the number of paradigm-shifting scientific papers signs
that mental sloth is a reality we must contend with?

Such concerns seem to be unfounded. When IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue defeated
world chess champion Gary Kasparov, many had feared that the board game was
doomed. There were those who said that as chess-playing computer softwares
become popular, humans would drop out of the game. But what happened was the
exact opposite. Earlier, those playing chess had to depend on a few rare books
to learn the game’s best strategies. Today humans can perfect their skills
playing against computers. With the easy availability of knowledge on chess
games, many more people, even from rural parts of countries, have started
playing chess. Many are even becoming grandmasters at much younger ages than
before. This just goes to show that technology does not necessarily destroy
human innovativeness, but could enhance it instead in significant ways.

With reports that Microsoft could invest a whopping $10 billion in AI
technology, one could expect many more technological advancements in this field
in the near future. As we saw in the world of chess, humans will probably find
new ways to collaborate with these AI advances. This human-AI collaboration will
likely be driven by new human behavioural trends.

Over the centuries, the time spent by humans on education has not changed much.
Most human learning has occurred in educational institutions, before embarking
on careers. This scenario is going to change dramatically. Tech innovations will
force humans to upgrade themselves, so as to stay one step ahead of the
technology that could replace them. So life-long learning will be the new norm
across the educated world. Gone are also those days when a person will focus on
only one area of learning. To make one relevant to ever-changing times,
multi-disciplinary learning is what people will likely seek. The life-long
acquisition of new knowledge will be the best antidote for any intellectual
laziness.

Biju Dominic is chief evangelist, Fractal Analytics, and chairman, FinalMile
Consulting.

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