Weekly Brief
The Machines are not on a campaign to out-think us. They don’t have to. Non-thinking machines such as social media are, instead, degrading our ability to think.
In review and in prospect
The brain is the body’s most energy-demanding organ. As such, it evolved mechanisms to keep its functions to a minimum so we consume less resources. At its most basic, it is constantly ingesting data captured by our six senses and constructing a dynamic model of our environment. As we go through our day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute lives, the brain is constantly evaluating how closely the environment we perceive through those senses match that model. Whenever there is a match, the brain is happy and relatively restful in its ability to predict what happens next and rely on relatively unconscious low-resource-consuming learned behaviour (such as reflexes and “muscle memory”) to keep the body safe from harm and death. However, when it encounters a mismatch — a predictive error — it needs to fire up extra neurons to alert us to that unexpected scenario and respond to it consciously.
Conscious episodes, therefore, arise whenever the mental model of our environment constructed by our brains is in bad need of updating. This is the reason we are able to daydream while tooling along a highway amongst other vehicles travelling the same speed. Our mental model predicts that we are safe driving at what would otherwise be a dangerous 100 km/h because we expect other cars to move predictably relative to ours. However, the minute a car cuts into our lane too closely or when one we are following slows down drastically, our peachy model of a predictable flow of traffic is invalidated (increasing our risk of inappropriate action that could lead to death) and we snap into action. Thus begins one such conscious episode — one of millions that occur episodic time frames ranging from split seconds (such as the driving example) to hours or even days (such as when we are watching an interesting movie, on a first date, or travelling through a new location).
This puts into perspective what social media does to our brains. While our “feeds” constantly bombard us with interesting mental-model-breaking stimulus, it has reduced our cognitive responses to update our mental models of the world down to a mere choice of (1) scrolling on or (2) stopping to “like”, “retweet”, or “re-share”. If we choose to perform an activity a bit more engaged than the two — such as, say, commenting — tech also gives us a way to do that with minimum effort; SMS-speak (“k”, “lol”, etc.), emojis, memes, and GIFs.
Funny then. As the subject of artificial intelligence (AI) “trends” on social media, people ask “Will robots replace me?”. Mainstream media are happy to indulge this question so there is no shortage of “answers” to that bit of quaint existential reflection. The fact is, however, machines are hitting us from an unexpected vista instead competing with us over a known field. If we think “thinking” is what sets ourselves apart from The Machines and that this is the prize at stake in a “war” with them, well, we’re in for a bit of bad news because it is evident that The Machines aren’t on a campaign to out-think us. They don’t have to. Non-thinking machines such as social media are, instead, degrading our ability to think. AI is just the icing on the cake of an already formidable Machine arsenal that will win the “war” against humans. They will win not by thinking better than us but making us think less. We are already seeing that happening.
Last week’s blog posts
March 12, 2023 by benign0
"...its number of speakers does not necessarily make Tagalog a great medium for communication any more than cockroaches outnumbering people a thousand to one don’t necessarily make them a great animal."