Technology is Destroying Our Minds

It feels like everyone has their hot take on 1) smartphones and 2) AI, most of which fall into the category of "they're destroying our minds."

I have no doubt they're destroying our minds. That's what technology does. It enhances our lives by taking over some aspect of what our minds (or bodies) once did for themselves.

For most of human history no one knew what time it was. Around 1275 mechanical clocks were invented that could chime to let people know the hour. That's as precise as it got. The minute hand didn't appear until the 15th century with in-home grandfather clocks becoming widespread around 1675. And personal clocks -- pocket watches -- didn't really become widespread for another 200 years . . . Followed by the second hand.

The clock with its relentless tick-tock-tick divided up our days into smaller and smaller units, externalizing the pace of our days from our minds to machines, making us slaves to efficiency and punctuality. They disconnected us from the natural rhythms of life, the arc of the sun, the phases of the moon, the cycle of the seasons. Clocks destroyed the easy, individual pace of routines with standardized schedules, making us more machine and less human.

Today, just 250 years into the mechanical clock experiment, most of us can't conceive of life without clocks. And we definitely don't see how they've destroyed our minds. We wear them on our wrists, carry them in our pockets; they're on our microwaves, computer screens, car dashboards, and beside our beds. There's hardly a moment of our lives when a clock isn't measuring our progress, prodding us, chiding us, making us products of the Industrial Revolution.

But it's not just clocks.

The phonetic alphabet destroyed our minds.

The printing press destroyed our minds.

Television destroyed our minds.

Smartphones are destroying our minds.

And it's only a matter of time before AI destroys our minds.

I'm not saying I want to get rid of or stop any of it, only that the entire point of technology is to externalize something that was previously a function of our minds and bodies, theoretically freeing us up for "more important things." We no longer have to use our minds to memorize Homer because it's been written down and printed onto pages and bound into books . . . Where few of us ever read it. We no longer have to waste our time going out in public because we can bring "the public" into our homes. We no longer have to navigate our way around the world, look things up in the library, or write our own essays.

In his book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams conceived of the Electric Monk: "The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe."

The real question isn't what technology is doing to us, but rather what we are going to do with our minds and bodies now that they are freed up to do other more important things. 

That's the cruel joke of it, of course. It typically only takes a generation for us to forget what things were like before our minds were destroyed because we fill up our minds and occupy our bodies with things that aren't really that important. Anthropologists estimate that our hunter-forager ancestors worked 20 hour weeks. They spent the rest of their time inventing things like dance, music, art, storytelling, community, and yes, technology. What they did with their free time is, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut, fart around. Today, the average American works more than twice that, and most of us aren't farting around at all in our free time, let alone inventing anything. We let our technology do our farting around for us as we scroll and veg out.

This is something those of us who work with young children see more clearly than the rest of the world. We spend our days with humans whose minds have not yet been destroyed by literacy, clocks, smartphones, or AI. They spend most of their time doing what comes most naturally to humans whose basic physical, social, and emotional needs are met, which is to say fart around by exploring, experimenting, discovering, and inventing. That's what play-based learning is all about and it's why most people simply can't grasp it: their minds are too far gone to comprehend the world in which our youngest citizens exist, a world without all those technologies that have usurped parts of the human mind.

The encroachment of the technology of "academics" into preschool is destroying our children's minds. When we drill two-year-olds on phonics, we are destroying their minds far more completely than any smartphone. Am I exaggerating? I don't think so. One of the main things we moderns use our "freed up" minds for is to fret and worry. Mental disorders are at crisis levels. But most disturbing to me is that we are today experiencing anxiety and depression in preschoolers at rates never before seen. Nearly 10 percent of our children are on medications to treat their mental illnesses. I'm not exaggerating.

We're not going to stop technology, but we can fortify our youngest children, these original humans, with a time during which we allow them to know what it means to fart around, which is to say, to play.

The antidote to childhood anxiety, indeed, the antidote for anxiety in general, is to be free to fart around. It's when we're farting around -- exploring, experimenting, discovering, and inventing -- that we are truly free to be ourselves, to follow our curiosity, and, most importantly, to make our lives personally meaningful; to find our own, unique, and wonderful purpose, to witness wonder and awe in our lives. This is the foundation of what it means to be human.

The unfulfilled promise of every technology is to free us up for more play, which is to say, to come alive. The world needs more people who have come alive. And if they have any hope of ever coming alive, our youngest children need us to protect them from technologies that will destroy their minds, including the technology of academics.

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