When we built a boat, we lost the knowledge to swim
When we built a vehicle, we lost the stamina to walk
When we built a smartphone, we lost the knack to memorise
When we built an AI, we lost the ability to think.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I use AI almost daily for my work. But my sentiments resonate more with Oppenheimer – a mix of pride in the scientific achievement and horror at its destructive power.
The invention of fire was no different – it had the power to light up the room, or burn down the house. Then, it would be silly to blame the flame for the aftermath. Rather, we should turn our focus to the hand holding the matchstick.
So, let’s look inwards.
Aristotle stated that “The energy of the mind is the essence of life.”
Reading into this, the great philosopher was hinting at what we cannot trade away for better living. For him, life was being able to think.
But with the growing irresponsible dependency on AI, I fear where this will all lead.
Mexican tetra (Astyanax mexicanus) a.k.a the blind cave fish is a perfect example to remember. Given its habitat of complete darkness, the cave fish have become blind over hundreds of years. What’s left in place of eyes is a collapsed remnant covered by a flap of skin.
That’s how evolution works. Darwin recognized that when a living being no longer needs a part to survive, nature slowly takes it away. What was once useful shrinks or disappears over many generations.
Only, in the case of cognitive atrophy, since it’s not about anatomy but psychology, the transition happens much sooner. So, while cave fish evolved over decades, for the mind to diminish won’t take that long. In simple words, we may lose our mental acuity at the speed of a prompt.
In the early 2000s, a set of neuroscience findings were first published, which was then followed up over two decades continuing the study of the brains of London Taxi Drivers.
To get a taxi license in London, the drivers must master the knowledge by memorizing over 25,000 streets, routes, and landmarks. Researchers discovered that these drivers had larger posterior hippocampi (a brain area crucial for spatial navigation). Though this specialization in spatial navigation seemed to have come at the expense of other memory abilities. The same drivers tended to perform worse on certain visual memory and new object recall tasks.
When the researchers continued the follow-up study upon retirement of the drivers, who had by then stopped practicing complex navigation, the enlarged posterior hippocampus shrank toward normal size – much like muscles that weaken when you stop training.
Naturally, our over-reliance on GPS navigation has likely already reduced our hippocampal activity, suggesting our natural mapping abilities might have begun to erode.
This is perhaps one of the clearest, measurable examples of neuroplasticity – the brain physically adapting to meet a demand – and also of the “use it or lose it” principle.
While the London taxi driver paradox shows how the brain can expand its navigational maps when the job demands it, MIT research flips the lens, revealing what happens when tools like ChatGPT remove the need to build those maps at all.
Not long ago, MIT researchers divided fifty-odd people into three groups and asked them to write essays. One group had no assistance, another group had internet access, while the last group had ChatGPT access.
Participants using ChatGPT wrote 60% faster but their “relevant cognitive load” dropped by 32%. EEG monitoring showed brain connectivity was almost halved, and 83% of AI users couldn’t remember passages they had just written.
Lead scientist Nataliya Kos’myna was so alarmed she released results early, warning that using AI for children’s learning could harm developing brains the most.
Now, imagine if we are rashly driving down the path of blind cave fish. For creative individuals, losing our capacity for independent thought will no longer be science fiction.
In our case, the environmental change isn’t physical. It’s technological. Our over-reliance on quick-fixes, leading to dependency on templates, frameworks, and AI has gradually created an environment where original thinking is no longer necessary for professional survival.
We are getting used to formulas without understanding them. And like the cave fish, the cognitive machinery is still there. But each generation of creatives exercises it less, until eventually…
But let’s not dwell on the doom. Let’s consider if there’s a way to sustain our minds – after all, that’s the only thing that gives us an unfair advantage despite our position in the food chain.
So, is there hope for humans?
Well, at least for the cave fish, there was.
In a research paper published in Science (2000), by Yoshiyuki Yamamoto (then a postdoc) and William R. Jeffery (Professor of Biology), this was well established. What they did was take a lens from a surface fish and implanted it into the cave fish optic cup, and vice versa as a reciprocal control.
After the transplant, eye structures began to re-form under the skin within about a week and in about two months a more normally structured eye had developed – with a pupil, cornea, iris and rod photoreceptors in the restored retina. Unfortunately, the decade-long evolution had done some irreparable damage. The brain wiring for vision was also degraded in cavefish, so restoring the eye alone wasn’t enough for full sight.
Yet, the takeaway from this is if we wake up at the right time, perhaps there’s hope for us. If only, we can take our lessons from psychologist, William James:
“Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day.”