There was a time when memorizing multiplication tables, phone numbers and travel route landmarks counted as essential life skills. Then calculators, smartphones and Google Maps took over those traditional functions of the human brain. Today’s trends are very clear. As technology progresses rapidly, more and more human tasks will be taken over by digital technology. Now, with the introduction of ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI), many big questions are being raised. What human functions will it consume? With the human brain having even less work to perform, will mental inactivity lead to intellectual laziness?
The sea squirt is a small sea creature with a strange lifestyle. It begins life afloat with the aid of a brain and nervous system, but, having attached itself to its permanent home, it digests these now-redundant organs and takes on a vegetative existence. The ocean current reminds us of what our brains evolved for: to orchestrate and express active movement. Those adopting a couch-potato lifestyle will lose their brain power. Will advances in AI cause this tragedy of organ failure among humans?
As an agricultural economy gave way to an industrial economy, and as machines took away much of the manual labor, people became less physically active. Sedentary lifestyles have led to a worldwide obesity epidemic. But then luckily, the knowledge economy took off. In this economy, the human brain has been highly active. So although the physical body was not as active as it was during the agricultural or industrial ages, the intense brain activity was still burning a lot of calories. But today, in an emerging economy based on AI, not only the human body, but also the human brain may be less active than before. So, are humans at risk of experiencing both physical and intellectual obesity at the same time?
In the past, our obesity problem was aggravated due to lack of physical activity with the advent of junk food. Likewise, the emerging inactivity of the brain has been complemented by a tremendous increase in the time that humans, especially the younger generation, are spending on online games and pornography. The video game industry is expected to be worth approximately $200 billion in the US in 2021—more than its music, book publishing and sports businesses combined. A survey released by US security company Netscope shows that the consumption of pornographic content has increased by 600% in the first half of 2020 compared to the same period last year. This pandemic-induced behavioral trend looks set to continue.
One of the measures of human intelligence is called the Flynn Effect. It refers to the observed increase in standardized intelligence test scores over a period of time. This increase was found to be constant and roughly linear from the early days of such intelligence testing around the world until the mid-1990s. But some recent studies suggest that the increase in the Flynn effect in developed countries is no longer as sharp as it used to be. A new study recently published in the journal Nature finds that since 1945, there has been a dramatic decline 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.
This suggests a growing intellectual laziness among scientists and a tendency to seek incrementalism over intellectual leaps. Does the slowing of the Flynn Effect and the decline in the number of paradigm-shifting scientific papers indicate that mental retardation is a reality we must confront?
Such concerns seem unfounded. When IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov, many feared the board game was doomed. There were those who said that as computer software playing chess became popular, humans would be out-competed by the game. But what happened was exactly the opposite. In the past, chess players had to rely on a few rare books to learn the best strategies for the game. Today man can improve his skill of playing against computer. With the easy availability of knowledge of the game of chess, many more people, even from rural parts of countries, have taken to playing chess. Many are already becoming Grandmasters at a very young age. It just goes to show that technology doesn’t necessarily destroy human innovation, but can enhance it in important ways.
With the report that Microsoft may invest a whopping $10 billion in AI technology, many more technological advancements can be expected in this area in the near future. As we saw in the world of chess, humans will probably find new ways to cooperate with these AI advances. This human-AI collaboration will likely be driven by new human behavior trends.
The amount of time man has spent on education has not changed much over the centuries. Most human education has taken place in educational institutions before starting a career. This landscape is about to change dramatically. Tech innovations will force humans to upgrade themselves, so that they can stay one step ahead of the technology that may replace them. So life long learning will be the new norm in an educated world. Gone are the days when a person would focus on only one area of learning. To make one relevant to the ever-changing times, multidisciplinary education is what people would be looking for. The best antidote for any intellectual laziness would be the acquisition of new knowledge throughout life.
Biju Dominic is the Chief Evangelist for Fractal Analytics and the President of FinalMile Consulting.
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