Some Blog Site

There’s a scene in the movie Wall-E where the guy is explaining that after so many generations in space, human bodies experience loss of bone density – some skeletal changes. If you’re not using something, it wastes away. Like if you’re bedridden for a while, your muscles atrophy.

Here’s a still from the movie. If you’re looking for it, it’s at time 48:17 into the movie, if you’re looking at the progress bar in Disney+.

And each time technology progresses, there’s a study that shows how humans are using their brains less. For example, everyone used to know many phone numbers. Now with cell phones doing all the remembering for you, people don’t know anyone’s phone number anymore. I know my wife’s phone number because she’s had that number before smartphones existed so I had to know it. But I don’t know any of my children’s phone numbers because I never have dialed their numbers. Since phones remember things for people, people are losing their memorization capability.

Phone numbers was an early indicator. Next thing that comes to mind is navigation. People used to be able to read maps. Now they just know how to follow the line and the instructions that come up on the screen. Being the navigator in the car these days means selecting the destination on the nav unit, not actually knowing where you are. So people are losing their navigation/direction/way-finding abilities.

Now with AI doing a lot of things, people are losing those abilities too – writing essays, putting thoughts together, putting lists together, drawing pictures of themselves as Star Wars characters, etc. More skill atrophying. But at least we humans are retaining the ability to identify all stoplights and crosswalks in various photos, thanks to captcha for honing those skills.

I’m sure there are some more examples, but that’s just what I came up with quickly. The point of this blog post is not to make a list of everything that’s atrophying, rather I just wanted to show the results of all such degradation in the style of Wall-E.

Here it is:

That’s all really. Keep using your brain – exercise it – so that you don’t lose functionality.