Wednesday, October 16, 2024

How Technology Makes Humans Dumber

At first, this title makes no sense. How would something that helped humans to travel to the Moon be bad for us? And no, I will not try to sell the even dumber argument about how recording telephone numbers on a smartphone makes us less capable of recording a number ourselves. Hang on for a while, I will try to show you something.

As my high school sociology teacher used to say, technology is anything that helps a living being do something. One can think of cars as a technology that helps us with transportation, or cell phones that help us communicate. However, the dark side is that any kind of technology makes something that takes time into something fast. Even though this speed is required for us to develop more complex things, did God make us to work that fast?

Think about it, the first homo sapiens ever discovered dates 300.000 years back, but to be fair the oldest being with similar creative capabilities such as creating art, trades, ornaments, or burial rites are 30.000 years old. At a time when not even agriculture existed, I assume we had just some basic daily activities, such as standing at the side of the community to protect others, walking for ours to get food, and collecting sticks for a fire. The same brain used only for those basic activities is used today to create abstract options like algorithms or marketing strategies, even though it was never developed to do so. Evolution acted upon our brain considering that we had only to do basic reasoning and had a lot of time to plan things.

Back then we had a lot of time to use for simple tasks which created a lot of idle time that could be used to consider options, plan the future, and have ideas. But as more technology is created, the less boring tasks we have during the they, therefore less idle time to occupy our brains with planning types of thoughts. Nowadays, I argue that the peacefulness that the Church brings to its followers is another word for the sentiment of spending one week hour of boredom, which might be the only idle time the Christian might have in the whole week. All the remaining time of the week might be filled with video calls, social media interaction, and entertainment consumption. 

As time went on, we seemed to have lost the idea that spending time doing nothing, or just doing some boring manual labor, can actually be a good thing because it allows us to think of life in a more general way. That kind of feeling might also be essential to bring us a feeling of control and safety.

Right now we have so much we can do at all times, that the only moment you have to consider something is at the Sunday mass, which is probably the only time you have to spend time doing nothing. Doing nothing was basically intrinsic to human capabilities, and even though we have some of that while washing the dishes, how would a human being that lives nowadays know that it needs 7 hours of doing nothing, just like its predecessor had when spent the whole day manually farming the land.

Without it, I argue that we will have an increasing amount of psychological problems, caused by the lack of confidence and planning that being bored allows us to feel. Even though we have known about this fact since WALL-E came up, nobody seems to pay attention to it and really spend time doing nothing to help with life understanding. Because of that we essentially keep spending time on trivial/immediate decisions and never think something through.

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