The Saturday Exhale Episode 22: What Are Our Tools Doing To Us?

Vadim Gershteyn, PhD, MPH served as my editor for StressHacked and contributed writing to my upcoming book The Stone Wall. He joins me for this discussion.

AT: Technology is moving at a rapid pace. Every year, more and more tools which advertise that they can improve our bodies, mind, and communication emerge. We have been primed to think this is unequivocally a good thing, progress. In order to assess the validity of this framing, we need to engage in two critical lines of questioning:

1. Are the claims of these emerging tools true? Namely, do their purported claims stand up to reality?
2. What is a tool? What does utilizing a tool mean?

The first question isn’t the first principle, but is necessary in order to understand if asking the second question is relevant and necessary. For instance, with an emerging and powerful tool such as AI, via LLMs such as ChatGPT, Grok, and others, we need to separate functions which are reasonably accurate and potentially beneficial—utilization as a search function, a thesaurus, and some other techniques where it proves reliable and substantially more effective than traditional search engines—and tasks in which it inarguably causes harm, such as offloading thinking and complex work in which it is not designed or intended to do. The latter leads to critical errors, professional embarrassment, and is contributing to a growing body of real world disasters.

Once we identify what a potential tool can do, we need to get to the first principles of asking ourselves what a tool is, in what way we can utilize it, and what skill or capacity we lose by its adoption. Just as anything that leads to a potentially beneficial physiological effect can likewise contribute to deleterious effects (side effects), any tool that offers an increase in capacity through its utilization necessarily leads to a weakening of the capacities we had prior to its invention. Or perhaps more accurately, it shifts the distribution of each individual’s capabilities in a manner that may atrophy skills developed prior to the adoption of the tool, with said skills perhaps rippling through other domains. As such, this atrophying of isolated skillsets may lead to systemic effects, weakening other capabilities in dynamics which are difficult to isolate, observe, or articulate. In this manner, for a subset of those using any tool—dare I say the majority—tools inevitably become crutches which will gradually weaken overall capacity.

Moreover, most of us who adopt tools tend to become over reliant upon them, typically overestimating their utilization and abilities. Those who become over reliant and overconfident in the use of various “Biohacking” devices or supplements may begin forgetting the foundational basics, namely the lifestyle interventions that ought to be paramount. They justify less exercise, overindulge with their diet, get out in nature less, and the list goes on. Likewise, utilizing an LLM for our thinking leads to scenarios where we stop thinking altogether, soon forgetting how to analyze problems ourselves in the first place.

I want to make it clear, I’m not a Luddite. I am absolutely not advocating for bans, or even campaigns which demonize the use of any tool that poses the potential for increased capacity. Instead, I am criticizing the mindless pursuit forward, towards what we believe is progress, calling for us to remember what a tool is, and what we lose by its adoption. Some of us use tools to great effect, increasing capacity while remaining vigilant of the harms. It would be unethical to prevent the responsible from lifting themselves, and often others, up in order to protect the rest from misuse. But, we must do a better job of informing the rest, of cautioning against the potential harms.

Unfortunately, this position is inherently anti-consumeristic, calling for cautious adoption after deep personal reflection. Those locked into short-sighted thinking, quarterly reports and financial analysis, and everything tied to our normative commerce will gawk at the suggestion that we should market the harms. For those in more senior positions, the board members and powerful voices who desire for long term stability, know that a future with reduced capacity is a future in which everything declines—even if your relative shares increase. More of something less is an oxymoron if the totality decreases. Ask yourselves: do you want to rule over an empire of dirt? Or would you prefer to be thriving, elevated in status and recognition, in a thriving empire?

The choice remains up to each of us, the collective, in our varying capacities. Our future depends on how we perceive, understand, utilize, and learn about emerging tools. The moves are ours, but will we make the right ones? It’s impossible to know, we can only strive to improve, to remind ourselves that increasing capacity via a tool is only useful if it adds to the capacity of the individuals using said tool.

VG: The empirical evidence for what Alex describes is substantial. First, there is the cognitive offloading effect. This has been studied in domains like smartphones, GPS, calculators, and so on. If we use calculators often, we get worse at doing math without them. If we use GPS often, we get worse at reading maps for directions, not to mention using our spatial memory for navigation itself. Second, there is the so-called “Google effect”: we’re less likely to remember something when we know it’s accessible on the Internet. Third, there is the “smart phone brain drain” phenomenon: students have been shown performing worse on exams when there is a smartphone next to them, even if they are not using it.

The only caution I would provide to Alex’s polemic is to point out that human beings are tool-using beings. As I mentioned in another newsletter, the only reason there are human beings at all is because a hominin crafted a handaxe and, given some time, we were born. Further, I want to pose the question of to what degree we are all cyborgs already. Which is to say, many of us have heart monitors, implants, glasses, prosthetic limbs. We’ve survived surgeries and exist due to the increased effectiveness of modern medicine. Some of us, relatedly, exist because we go to a dialysis machine three times a week. Some of us exist (but probably not “ex-ist” in the Heideggerian sense; i.e., to “stick out from”) on a daily dose of methadone. Culture is built around this tool-use, and it adapts to tool-use, evolving with it. As Donna Haraway puts it in her A Manifesto for Cyborgs,

The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The relationships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; i.e., through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the Oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection—they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.

AT: This is essentially what I was driving at, hidden in plain sight, when I remarked that in atrophying any ability in which a tool now completes, we lose said capacity—and perhaps alter countless other abilities and their unique capacities due to the changed dynamic of all of what makes us, us. In short, a tool is not just a tool, it transforms our very self into a new reality.

Change isn’t necessarily good or bad. Even when we look to drive change towards good, there can be unintended consequences, negating the impact of the good, or even leading to net harm. In short, change does not exist in isolation, and when we employ a new tool we must be cognizant of this. Like I said, I’m not a Luddite. I embrace new tools, albeit cautiously, with curiosity and also a healthy dose of apprehension. I do this as I recognize the simultaneous drives:

1. I like who I am, and so I am cautious of changing who I am.
2. The world is constantly changing, and if I refuse a new tool others are utilizing, my self will change due to my rejection and subsequent stagnation.

So, with external change we must assess the risks, carefully, and choose the path in which we believe maintains our being and essence in a manner that directs us towards who we are, or usually who we want to become. This careful analysis rarely occurs in people, instead they either impulsively adopt, or reject, new tools, leading to a future in which change happens to them, whether they like it or not. Usually, this change is deleterious, at least in time. Those carefully analyzing this reality are operating as the “house” in the casino. The odds are in our favor, the house always wins. Those just playing based on a whim, an emotion, or random choice will sometimes win, sometimes lose, but eventually the losses will take their toll, leaving the game with less than they should have.

To expand on this, consider this passage from my upcoming bookThe Stone Wall:

A different version of us lives in the mind of everyone we have ever met, this is wisdom that has oft been repeated. However, it is also true that different versions of ourselves live within us, triggered by the patterns and surroundings we exist in. Consider times when you encountered an old friend or colleague, someone you haven’t seen in years or decades. Think about your behavior, and I’m sure you will recognize actions and thoughts which emerged that you believed were long shed.

Tools change us, but we may not completely notice this, as perhaps we revert to old, familiar scripts around other “constant” people or triggers in our lives. It is important to understand that there is no singular “self,” for we are many people simultaneously, the “self” being simply the totality of all operating programs, and the frequency in which said programs surface and take charge. Tools, just like all external factors such as other individuals, when around us often enough, hold the capability to substantially alter the frequency of each operating system that surfaces, with said systems inherent behaviors and capacities. This is precisely why we, as individuals, can find our past self unrecognizable, while others remark we haven’t changed at all. We tacitly understand yet can’t explicitly articulate in the face of evidence to the contrary, namely our momentary behavior, creating a disconnect between what we feel and internally know, and the interactions others who know us well experience.

In time, running different operating systems at a greater frequency will ripple through and alter the capacity of every other system, changing the totality of the self, along with each individual system that makes up the self, until our new self is largely unrecognizable from the old—at least in totality, even if many of the systems within maintain shades of their former operations. That is why when adopting new tools, just like surrounding ourselves with new people, a new hobby, project, or immersing in a new culture or activity, the question should always be: “who am I working towards becoming, and does this move me in that direction?”

We need to stop asking the easy question of what the tool can do right now for us, and learn to ask the harder questions of what they possess the power to eventually do to us.