We end 2024 confirming what we already suspected: so much use of social networks is leaving our brains lazy. As recently highlighted in an article by Facundo Macchi, internet addiction causes structural changes in the brain, dysfunctions such as reduced attention span and memory.
This research, supported by the work of prestigious institutions such as Harvard Medical School, or King’s College London, reveals that, when we consume social networks in a loop, we end up thinking with less clarity and focus and we tend, hand in hand with the trickster algorithm, to generate an altered perception of reality.
We’ve had a lot of fun on these platforms. It just happens that the bill they have passed on to us is heavier than we thought.
With the few neurons available, we face 2025, the year in which, paradoxically, we will need to tread more carefully in the analysis of networks, the great lung of global communication, especially now that Donald Trump assumes the helm of the world’s leading power.
We already know that he is not alone at the top. Elon Musk has made it clear that his ambitions for power know no borders and aspires, at the stroke of a chequebook and tweet, to become the global meta-president by supporting ultra candidates with electoral appointments in 2025.
We have arrived short of reflexes at a historical moment that requires us to be vigilant to identify the risks that techno-feudalism poses to our democracies.
2025 will be the year in which we must defend the autonomy of our societies and, above all, protect our own individual autonomy. If networks have already reduced some of our cognitive abilities, we now run the risk that the unlimited use of artificial intelligence will make us increasingly dependent.
It is impressive how easily ChatGPT or any generative artificial intelligence writes for us, with the desired style, whatever we ask it to do, whether it is a letter, an essay, a message of condolence, a book summary or a thread on X.
AI plans our next weekend getaway in a second, solves family menus and balances the budget for Christmas or office gifts for 2025. Dozens of applications are at our disposal to generate photographs, illustrations or videos based on the situation and the protagonists that we indicate. It seems like magic and we are only at the beginning of this revolution.
AI will become more powerful, cheaper and invisible every day. It is difficult not to exploit the enormous advantages that this technology will bring to our lives in terms of optimising resources and saving time.
But now I invite you to a little reflection: think of all those occasions when you give an artificial intelligence an intellectual task that you would have previously performed personally.
Calculate the number of times you have stopped writing by hand to organise your ideas or outlining the text for a professional letter or for a close relative.
How many mathematical calculations scribbled in a notebook did he stop doing in 2024 or the times his imagination and creativity were left on the bench. In short, draw the map of its “cognitive transfer” to artificial intelligence.
Perhaps this exercise will help to define which tasks we want to delegate and which we don’t, those we want to continue doing with our brainiacs.
It will not be the technology companies that alert us to the need to protect our freedom against the tsunami of technology and its imposing capacity to create dependent beings, as has happened with social networks.
Philip Micallef is a former executive chairperson of the Malta Communications Authority, chief executive of the Bermuda Regulatory Authority, CEO of Melita Cable, CEO of Mata Enterprise, CEO of Air Malta, and C+ Executive at Olivetti and Orange Business Services.