Smartphones: Parts of Our Minds? Or Parasites?
tandfonline.com
tandfonline.com
1) The abstract appears to be an opinion piece; I don't know how they do things in philosophical journals but I would hope for a dryer standard.
2) Nature is really messy - it'd make sense if parts of our bodys were actually parasites. The immune system, gut flora, skin mites are all obvious places where foreign hostile bodies might colonise then integrate into humanity over time. If an addition has any benefits evolutionary pressure will eventually cause it to become symbiotic.
3) Humans are by design easy to manipulate. We're social animals built to group up behind leaders and do what they say. There are brutal social hierarchies where low status humans live relatively unpleasant lives because high-status humans think that is reasonable. We're not built to unthinkingly optimise out own personal outcomes of make all the decisions ourselves. Humans being manipulated is not, in and of itself, a hint that things are going wrong.
4) "It is not plausible for a part of the cognitive system to be designed to thwart the goals and desires of the user in the way a smartphone is" - it absolutely is, the #1 enemy of most people is their own mind. It leads them to do wildly stupid things. There are people who spend their entire lives working to overcome their own cognitive systems to achieve peace and happiness.
> Humans being manipulated is not, in and of itself, a hint that things are going wrong. If a car can be stolen, should it be stolen ? If a dog can be beaten, should it be beaten ? I don’t think because something is fragile that it should be broken, on the contrary. We should recognize the delicacy of our species and design around it. That’d be a sign of evolved behaviour , I’d reckon.
> the #1 enemy of most people is their own mind Again, define the « mind ». Is it really the mental space people live in that is the problem or the culture, teachings, bullyings and programmings that have been thrown at them since birth that are maladaptive ? I’d argue that the mind is fine, given what it can do and that it is just a tool. It is what we do with it that matters and since birth, we’ve been hijacked to fit in society.
Well, if this is meant to counter the abstract's claim that:
> Modern smartphones are designed to manipulate the attention and behaviour of users in ways that further the interests of the corporations that built them. In this they are importantly different from resources typically associated with the extended mind—such as notebooks, Scrabble racks and maps—which are not designed to manipulate or exploit users
I think it falls a little short of refuting a claim that in this particular case things are going somewhat wrong.
Computers change who I am, for example they make me remember better and be more punctual. Probably indeed my smartphone messes with my ability to hold sustained attention.
But this article. it feels like one of those “why so complicated” ones. Why “our consciousness is partly in a machine”. It’s all just a matter of definitions. For example advocates of EMT and non-advocates probably just differ in some definition. It feels so unimportant. Other than that, nice read.
Ie “use it or loose it” kind of vibe.
That’s why one of the possible threats of AI is if one would “forget” how to reason. Or even worse: brain rewires itself to never being able to reason again.
Then again, for me personally it’s a very low probability in our lifetime: ie no that kind of earth-shattering changes of either real AI or, say, nuclear fusion in this century.
However I would love to see long-term studies of someone really smart start only watching tictoc, reels and shorts (and doing nothing else). With brain scanning and what have you.
> That’s why one of the possible threats of AI is if one would “forget” how to reason. Or even worse: brain rewires itself to never being able to reason again.
The "WALL-E/Idiocracy"-ification of humanity. It won't get so bad that we lose our ability to reason, but we're definitely losing something. Perhaps it's just our inevitable evolution.
They did this on considerably less nutrition and with smaller frames than your average American today.
The average human doesn't need to be that fit and strong anymore. Just like the future human won't need to be so intelligent anymore.
And yet it feels like maybe we shouldn't be giving that up so easily...
Formally educated as a biologist, nobody ever forced me to install Gentoo. Or compile kernels, or self-host all the things, or read Harari. It was all just curiosity. And I believe many if not most people here are like that.
So be careful generalizing I guess I’d say.
But the reality is that a sedentary lifestyle is the norm in the aggregate, despite the numerous people who buck the trend
I always think this when doom scrolling. I just can’t do it for very long without chiding myself. And now I see this generation below me who needs some moment for them selves every day: “I’m going to take some me time.” And what do they do? Take the somma (like YT shorts). It’s not inducing happiness. I worry sometimes.
I disagree. What saved us from physical toil was not physical fitness, but ingenuity. What keeps the world running is still ingenuity, and all signs point to the exact opposite of what you're saying: we'll need even smarter people in the future.
In most cases AI doesn't even lower the bar for anyone and makes topics harder to understand on a sufficiently deep level to do anything useful with that knowledge. With LLMs too many conflate communication with understanding. A robot middleman merely relaying the understanding of other humans does not itself possess that understanding.
The plough spared people from back breaking labour but now we have the opposite problem where less than 25 percent of Americans walk for more than ten minutes continuously in a typical week[1] and this presents both health problems both MSK and cardiovascular but also burdens on the healthcare system.
You seem to place a lot of faith in LLMs just being middlemen but the real life proof seems to be that many people, especially children and students, are leaning on it heavily in place of learning and understanding
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121130151132.h...
When was the time "most" didn't struggle?
same thing for numerical computations, i just watched a videos about handmade logarithms tables, and without this i don't grasp the concept much
it's a common issue for me that very often if I use a tool directly, i don't understand the principles behind and it feels all kinds of wrong
It is precisely the fever dream experience of a parasitic host as the fiend sucks the life from it.
At this point I’m pretty convinced that social media is a net negative for humanity with little redeeming quality.
There was a time when it did connect people, like you could meet people or find old friends, but that was long ago deprioritized or even stripped away. Now it’s just a pure chum feed that serves up either brain rot trash or political fear and rage bait.
TV was always full of crap but it also gave rise to great shows, to art and lasting culture. It was a medium of mixed value. Social media doesn’t even have that going for it unless some day people celebrate the great Pepe memes. Everything it creates is disposable low effort trash. Nothing worth keeping. You could delete it all and everyone would forget a week later.
I guess I use some slacks and discords and a few lists but that’s about it.
True. It also bonded people together. I have fond memories of watching certain shows and sport matches with my family.
“Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.” ― Augustine of Hippo
(Not saying anybody around here is wicked just remembering a striking quote)
I would not be at all surprised if the same phenomenon can happen with internet addiction, if maybe in a more benign form as far as bodily consequences go.
So no, drugs are not "autonomous" but to act like it's an easy matter to simply refuse to do them once you've started is an attitude that's shockingly ignorant of much of the modern understanding of addiction.
Drugs have additional chemical and physiological impacts that make them a very different beast, but obviously addiction can still be brutal even if it’s “just” an experience — look no further than gambling. For which most countries have strict laws and regulations, particularly when it comes to children.
But let’s also not infantilise adults: People need to take responsibility for their own behavioural patterns.
It does all that by it self? Of course not. This thing is not autonomous. Every app that _fill your head_ was your choice to install, signup and OPEN every time. It's like saying drugs are parasites. Of course they aren't. Your choices made you addicted to the thing. What happened to agency? Everyone is now a slave of social media apps?
I never feel a compulsion to check google maps for instance.
This parasite is easily exterminated.
After sitting in the patrol car for a quite while, some officer opens the door to speak with them. Immediately: "Can I get my phone??"
Sometimes they'll still have a phone after being cuffed and detained. They will nearly dislocate joints to thumb their phones continuously while cuffed. They will not stop until someone takes it.
I don't know...
I don't understand why it's ever so trendy to do this performative i-have-minimal-agency-in-my-existence bit when it comes to smartphones; swap that last word with "TV" and the same people professing it would smirk - presumably because that's an old timey, rather than a très trendy, thing to be part of.
> modern smartphones are better understood as external to, but symbiotic with, our minds, and, sometimes even parasitic on us, rather than as cognitive extensions
“Symbiotic with, and sometimes parasitic.” It feels like the symbiotic bit is more on point overall.
Wonderful definition, thank you. It has reach beyond software I think, into areas like harmful memes (mental parasites); even drug addiction.
(disclaimer: I'm the dev)
[0] https://relay.md
always almost never quite right