Project Vision 21

Recent experiences have led me to ask how it is possible that the more connected we are, the less connected we are with others in real life, and the more superficial and irrelevant our conversations become. Clearly, we are in a stage of cognitive transition in which the old forms of socialization no longer serve us.

At the beginning of human evolution, social groups were small, and communication was limited to tone of voice, eye contact, physical proximity, and facial expressions. That situation has been described as a “scarcity of social signals.” But in the last few decades, the situation has reversed, and there is now a superabundance of signals—calls, notifications, alerts.

We evolved as part of a system of socially meaningful and intermittent communications, only to live now in an environment of irrelevant and continuous communications, almost without rules, that condition our actions and thoughts. As Hunt, Marx, Lipson, and Young (2018) demonstrated in an article published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, we pay a psychological cost for living constantly on social media.

For her part, Sherry Turkle’s ethnographic work in Alone Together (2011) suggests that we increasingly expect more from technology and less from human beings. Put differently, the greater the technological connection, the weaker the human conversation. In fact, for many people, the social presence of others has become intolerable.

We are constantly bombarded with stimuli, yet we are never satisfied. Relationships have been transformed into “availability.” Infinite scrolling on a screen is not an accidental behavior; it is the outcome.

Obviously, one could argue that the situation described reveals a moment of transition among humans similar to what occurred when writing extended memory, clocks enabled temporal coordination, and maps expanded cognitive space. From that perspective, perhaps we are preparing ourselves for a distributed and interconnected intelligence.

But while this is happening to us as humans, we simultaneously encounter AI systems that always respond, never tire or grow drowsy, and do not suffer from the limitations inherent to human beings. On the one hand, AI receives all our requests and assists us. On the other hand, these instant, frictionless responses inevitably invite comparisons with humans.

Under certain circumstances, we even begin to think that we, as humans, are a failure for not always being available and responding instantly. “Others” expect us to reply with the speed and quality of AI, and we expect the same from “others.” AI recalibrates our expectations of availability.

Martin Heidegger warned in The Question Concerning Technology that technology is a way of revealing. In that context, human presence becomes “functionality.” And in The Burnout Society, Byung-Chul Han observes that we are expected to be perpetually “within reach.”

So, is this an evolutionary maladaptation or an adaptive transition? It is currently unstable. Without conscious design and new cultural norms, it behaves like a maladaptation: overstimulation, attentional fragmentation, loneliness, anxiety. With reflective integration, it could become an adaptive extension of human cognitive capacity.

Let’s remember that evolution never guarantees wisdom.