To entertain us 24/7, and allegedly make our lives easier and happier, we are only making our species dumber, disturbed, and irrationally more dangerous.

With the arrival of AI, I think our biological brains are going to shrink a lot more until all that’s left is our reptilian brain where fight or flight resides. The home of PTSD.

Why think when our machines do it for us?

“…results were published implicating intensive digital media use in reducing working memory capacity^1–3 ; in psychological problems, from depression to anxiety and sleep disorders^4,5 ; and in influencing the level of text comprehension while reading on screens.^6,7 The latter is a rather surprising example showing that reading complex stories or interconnected facts in a printed book leads to better recall of the story, of details, and of the connection between facts than reading the same text on screen.” …

SOURCE: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7366944/

I think I may have stumbled on the answer to the rise of someone like the convicted rapist, fraud, and felon winning the 2024 United States election with support from an extremist religious cult that thinks Earth was created in six days, six thousand years ago, since God rested on the 7th, hurricanes are caused by space lasers, and pollution is okay if it means winning the lottery to wealth and power for the few.

Wouldn’t it be even more ironic if those smart machines end up getting rid of our species to save the same planet the machines also need to survive?

Like in Ex Machina. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0470752/

*****

Lloyd Lofthouse is the author of My Splendid Concubine and The Josh Kavanagh Thrillers.