I've read the abstract and disagreed with it enough that I don't want to read the article proper.
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.
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.
> 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.
30 years ago my math teacher already referred to our calculators (Casio fx82s) as “cerebral prosthetics”. I’ve always used that for our bicycles of the mind.
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.
Yet most of the people now struggle with some basic calculations: “your calculator history is more embarrassing than your browser history”.
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.
Parasites. Period. This thing fills my head with a bunch of images from distant warped realities, summoned up out of thin air, it clogs my brain with a flood of other voices, it keeps me moving constantly from one mental landscape to the next.
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.
>Parasites. Period. This thing fills my head with a bunch of images from distant warped realities, summoned up out of thin air, it clogs my brain with a flood of other voices,
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?
You know that is you, not the phone, that is desperately looking for a distraction and a different reality.
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.
Pacifiers. For a while I watched dash cam video from police car chases. I'm over it now, but one interesting thing frequently happens: officers yank the drivers out, get them on the ground and cuff them. In most cases, the drivers are yelling about their phone. "My phone!" "My phone!" Cars is wrecked, they've got knees pressing them into the dirt, frequently injured, facing all manner of charges, and the one thing they care about it some phone.
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 think it’s important to highlight this part of the abstract:
> 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.
The symbiotic-parasitic spectrum likely depends on usage patterns - tools that augment cognition when used intentionally can become parasitic when designed to maximize engagement at the expense of user agency.
[disclaimer: did not read the article , but hey welcome to HackerNews comments!]
Small comment regarding augmented self via technologies:
I received feedback from my colleagues that Obsidian [a famous note taking app] was overkill and a waste of time to fill, during all our endless meetings.
Guess what?
3 years after I joined the company, my [bunch of notes, aka a] vault is probably more focused and insightful than 99% of the wikis, Google drives and spreadsheets my company struggles to govern.
Plus I can find equally what was said yesterday, or the knowledge transfer of a now retired ex-colleague from 2023 whose knowledge is now crucial to our work.
Ater realizing that my obsession for note-taking was more good than bad,
my team will soon start a common Obsidian so we can collectively keep track and retrieve the information that flows in our corporate brains.
We will see whether all that artificial content becomes a part of our minds or a parasite of it. [i vote the former]
Readit News
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
True. It also bonded people together. I have fond memories of watching certain shows and sport matches with my family.
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.
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.
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...
> 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
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