The quest for “progress” is geared around making our lives “easier.” Technology claims to streamline or automate tedious tasks supposedly freeing us up for other things. Self-driving cars are the holy grail; and in the meantime, we get not just cruise control but adaptive cruise control. Not only can we take our foot off the accelerator and set our goal speed, but our car can also sense when we catch up with a vehicle in front of us and slow us down without our mental or physical involvement. GPS directions, lane departure warnings, and more are ways that modern vehicles reduce driver involvement for our convenience and “safety.”
Creating convenience has long been a source of competitive advantage in business. Long before automation advanced in the auto industry, Thomas Cook created conveniences in the travel industry. He made international travel available to the masses by making it easier for people to overcome obstacles associated with getting from a to b. His business absorbed responsibility for managing logistics associated with travel so that many more became interested in playing the game. Instead of having to figure out how to find a flight, where to stay, and what to do at an exotic destination, tourists simply had to show up and be carted around and shown a good time about town. Organized tours and travel became a burgeoning business because Cook offered convenience to an industry that had previously required a bunch of effort to enjoy. Alex Hutchinson writing of Cook in The Explorer’s Gene notes, “he also created the template for an increasingly passive form of travel, in which you can be ushered through even the most remote landscapes without making any decisions, without engaging or interacting with local people, without running any risks.” Where we do less, we become less. This isn’t necessarily progress. When things are effortless, we become braindead. We turn off thinking.
Self-driving cars, like Cook’s travel “adventures” teach us to tune out. Philosopher Matthew Crawford writes of this direction in his book Why We Drive. Crawford sees driving as “this one domain of skill, freedom, and individual responsibility.” Three positive traits that are being eroded evermore with each introduction of convenience into our cars. Comfort is the promotion of passivity and an attack on agency. This is offered as progress yet leaves us as more of a mess. If progress results in you becoming less, that’s not success.
Researchers (and teachers) see this in today’s students where the immediacy of answers available from search engines trumps the need to develop a knowledge base by a learner. Why memorize historical facts and figures when they are readily available with a few keystrokes or speaking to your phone? Unfortunately, as research is finding when information is abundant it’s not considered valuable. The internet opens the world of information to virtually everyone. This seemed like a wonderful opportunity in the internet’s early days. Information wasn’t the exclusive purview of the elite few. The average person was no longer dependent on experts to tell us what was what. However, with all the world’s information readily available instantly, what’s the point of “knowing” something becomes the default. From 2011 to 2024 smartphone usage for US teens has grown from 25% to over 95%. Yes, answers can be quickly found, provided a good question can be entered into a search device. However, the fact disappears from our mind as quickly as it entered and we develop little understanding or context about these facts.
Excellence isn’t erected around erasing effort. No one has ever built a muscular physique by watching a machine move weight instead of lifting weights themselves. Search engines are simplistic compared to the capabilities of AI. Students now can not just look up information instantaneously, they can also have AI write papers for them. Writing, as many have noted, serves as a way of shaping our thinking on a subject. When we write, we work out our understanding (or lack thereof) on a subject. Where we no longer write and let AI do this for us, we no longer develop thoughts or understanding on the subject. A study done at MIT and written about in this article found that students using ChatGPT to write answers to assignments forgot what they were writing about within minutes. A professor from the University of Waterloo is quoted in the article observing, “People who overuse ChatGPT for routine cognitive tasks deprive their memory of the essential stimulation it needs to stay fit.” The MIT researchers asked their subjects to write without using AI their own understanding on a subject some four months after using AI originally. Even after being told to think independently, the students struggled to recall anything on the studied subject and significantly underperformed other students who had been studying a subject without AI assistance the entire time. Any short-term benefit of using AI to develop answers was offset by complete absence of knowledge lasting.
The article’s author leaves us with an interesting and frightening question, “As we outsource the struggle of finding our own words, are we outsourcing the formation of our own thoughts?” Is AI an assault on our autonomy and agency? Hutchinson sees convenience as akin to automation. He sees the split between effort and comfort in many areas of our lives as being about autonomy. He asks, “Do you have the freedom to follow your nose, to shape your experience by choosing to pursue the paths—literal or intellectual—that interest you the most? Or are you just swallowing whatever you’ve been spoon-fed?
I’m sure we’ve all heard about and laughed at stories where some tech-savvy youth drives into the ocean because they were “blindly” following the directions of their GPS over their own eyes. Researchers have since discovered that those using maps made in their mind to find their destination have physical differences in their brains compared to those that depend on a GPS. Specifically, those that can find where they want to go without a GPS have larger hippocampi. These studies are more than 15 years old. Hutchinson writes of one of these researchers noting, “She saw a societal shift toward instant gratification, efficiency at all costs, productivity as the only measure of value—all of which favor passive stimulus-response-driven thinking rather than slower, more effortful cognitive mapping. And a smaller hippocampus, she warned, raises your risk of various maladies, including Alzheimer’s disease, depression, schizophrenia, and post-traumatic stress disorder.” We’ve only gotten more dependent on our devices over the past decade and there are health risks to having a smaller hippocampus.
Evidence that supports the idea that easier existences lead to smaller brains comes from animal studies. Domesticated animals from pigs to cats have been compared to their siblings in the wild. The brains of boars are 50% larger than those of farm pigs. So, too, is it the case for brains of cats compared to lynx and cougars. The domesticated that have no need to take care of themselves have smaller brains. They’re, effectively, bred to be dependent, docile, and dumber. That doesn’t sound like something we want to copy.
Mark D’Souza points out in Lost and Found that “The more things are automated, the more empty we are spiritually.” We’re left wondering what our role or purpose is when everything is done on its own. Automation affords convenience but at the cost of being needed or relevant. We come to see ourselves as irrelevant which isn’t pleasant. Where we’re not needed, we’re not valued. A primary source of life’s meaning is being removed when convenience and comfort are prioritized.
Progress in the form of technology has been compared to a Trojan horse. Is it a gift or a curse, a blessing or a burden? Until we’re certain we should be reluctant to embrace it and welcome it into our homes and businesses. We should be more aware of the consequences of convenience. What are we giving up in our quest for comfort? What are the hidden costs of being taken care of? Is there such a thing as too much help? Back to our car example, many of the conveniences are sold as safety. What does it say about the designers’ thoughts about our capabilities that we must be protected from ourselves at all times? Those creating systems and institutions that “take care of people” see individuals as infants. They are pawns to be protected by experts. It’s a view that holds humans in low regard. There’s little confidence in the average person’s abilities. We’re seen as deficient and debilitated in some way. The “kind” or “moral” thing to do is to care for us by controlling us or limiting what we can do. Choices are narrowed and we’re funneled for our own good.
The saddest part about this is many of us welcome this guidance and happily abandon our agency. As Rory Vaden notes in Take the Stairs, “The frightening truth is that when we’re not thinking about our thinking, our thinking starts to think on its own.” When we clamor for comfort or ease, we are ceding our ability to control or influence things. Automation makes us automatons. Be careful what you ask for. Don’t develop dependence. Embrace independence. Run from those that want to dehumanize you and melt you into the mindless mob. Embracing automation produces passive people. We become less. Less discerning, less engaged, less capable. We become pliant, plodding, dolts led here and there. We’d do well to wake up and ask, who’s in charge? Our goal should be to run from Artificial Intelligence and instead act with our own version of personal AI: Awareness and intention. Get in the game else you’ll be led by those that are lame.
