We are, moment by moment, doing less sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, and attending

by Melanie Challenger  BIO

Photo by Jonas Bendiksen/Magnum

researches, writes and broadcasts on the nature of life and humanity’s place within it. Her books include On Extinction (2011), How to Be Animal (2021) and Alive (2026). She is also host of the podcast The Psychosphere, as well as an award-winning poet and librettist for opera and oratorios, and a National Geographic Explorer. Internationally active in bioethics, she is vice president of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, the co-founder of the project Animals in the Room, and deputy co-chair of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics.

Edited byPam Weintraub

It is almost four o’clock in the morning. As a woman in my late 40s, I have become prone to waking at this witching hour, as the early sunlight meets the night, sliding across the earth like a red tide. With the rest of my household asleep, and still half in and out of wakefulness myself, I take hold of my phone. With scarcely a thought, I switch from one app to another, scrolling through images and opinions and adverts for no discernible reason beyond habit.

Later, I head for my office and open my laptop to a slew of half-completed documents and an inbox brimming with emails. My stress levels begin to nudge upwards. I have vague memories of what my professional life felt like before smartphones and video calls. I used to do my writing by hand. And I could concentrate for hours at a time, getting little upticks of arousal from lifting my head from the page, letting the hold on my pen loosen, and gazing at the life beyond my window, the light softening on my skin and eyes like snowfall on warm tarmac.

Nowadays, my productive bursts come from caffeine and sugary or salty snacks, even if I try to pick the healthier ones, and from checking my emails or picking up my phone to update my inbox. By the end of the day, the sheer volume of work I expect myself to do, now that digital tools make so much possible, has kept me nailed to my seat. Another day has passed and the hope I’d had that I might have time for a run or a hike outside has been dashed again. I wish I could say that this is atypical. Yet, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I went from hours spent in nature and on physical activities to a passive, phone-addicted individual, meeting people first and sometimes only online. I am not alone.

We have fallen into habits that are steadily deskilling the human body, eroding capacities honed by evolution to support our wellbeing as we move through the world. Some of these capacities are weakening through disuse: we have come to rely on our phones, for example, and now, increasingly, on AI, to rapidly do work that would once have required something more physical – like looking around, or asking someone, or going to find and consult a book. Reliance on GPS may weaken both our spatial attention and the fluency of our wayfinding. In surrendering to a quick technological fix, we are, moment by moment, doing less sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, and attending. Other capacities are being retrained by machines and algorithms to work against us: for instance, smartphones and chatbots can train us to keep reaching for them even when we no longer enjoy using them, turning a conscious choice into an automatic habit and a colossal waste of time. The body that results is less able to assess its own condition, improvise and regulate itself. The crucial distinction is between technologies that strengthen our capacities and those that repeatedly substitute for the actions through which those capacities are formed.

Algorithms that regurgitate patterns and recommendations can release us from the effort of exploration and disrupt the play and curiosity from which preferences are formed and understood.

This is a strange turn of events for an animal whose success comes mostly from the extraordinary ability to learn through experience. It would be easy to blame our deskilled bodies on the machines themselves. But, for centuries, modern human societies have been sold the lie that we are machines.

Long before the digital revolution, René Descartes described the body as a machine governed by physical laws, declaring that animals such as ‘worms and flies and caterpillars move mechanically’. But he treated rational thought as a separate and uniquely human power. The body might behave like a machine, but the thinking mind stood apart from it. Build something correctly, and its function follows.

By the middle of the 20th century, the comparison between organisms and machines had been recast in the language of information. During the cybernetics revolution of the 1950s, the US computer scientist Norbert Wiener envisaged a future in which ‘messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part’. Writing in The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), he warned against wholesale automation, while also noting that ‘we are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves’. A person could be imagined as a pattern of information surviving in another form.

If the body is only hardware, why not upgrade to a better model or do away with it altogether?

Mechanical language also persisted in the study of living behaviour. In The Foundations of Ethology (1981), the Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz wrote that animal behaviour was as rigidly programmed as a sequence of movements in a clock. Transhumanist thinkers then carried the machine comparison further, imagining........

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