Every new tool we humans invent is born with the intention of fulfilling a specific need. But all tools have the potential to end up producing the opposite effect to the one intended when used excessively. This is what the philosopher Marshall McLuhan called the ” Law of Reversal ,” according to which any human tool or tool, when used excessively, produces the opposite effect to the one intended, collapsing the system for which it was created.

We can see this in things as simple as a traffic jam: when we use cars extensively and cause a traffic jam, the car, instead of helping us move, traps us in the traffic jam, preventing us from even being able to walk. The medium becomes an impediment to the development it was intended to produce.

This reversal explains why when we increase the use of a tool or device beyond a certain limit, the opposite effect is produced. Thus, hyperesthesia —excess sensory stimulation—ends up producing anesthesia—absence of sensations—exactly as occurs when we put so much salt in our food that everything ends up tasting bland, or when we turn up the volume of our headphones so high that we end up suffering from deafness.

Reversal and artificial intelligence

The Reversal Act would aim, among other things, to argue that the massive and indiscriminate use of artificial intelligence to study and resolve academic issues could lead to a very serious reversal of human intellectual capacities.

Human intelligence, in addition to being generative, is evolutionary , meaning it changes throughout life and depending on stimuli or circumstances. Human intelligence is a muscle: it grows or atrophies depending on how it is used and exercised. Multiple medical studies show that mental gymnastics are key to preventing cognitive decline . Because we are not born with a static intelligence, nor is it an organ or faculty that remains constant. Intelligence undergoes transformations, expansions, or regressions. Cultivating attention and reflection helps maintain our ability to adapt to changing and profound reality.

Digital amnesia and human memory

A 2015 study by a cybersecurity firm warned of the dangers of what it called “digital amnesia,” the loss of information stored in our brains due to the constant reliance on digital intelligence; some experts had previously warned of the “Google effect” on our ability to remember.

One of the fathers of artificial intelligence, Nobel Prize winner Geofrey Hinton , explains that these systems will soon surpass human intelligence, not so much because of their efficiency, but rather because of the intellectual decline they can cause.

According to Dr. Kathryn Mills, of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, the problem lies in the fact that these systems can replace autonomous brain activity, preventing people from searching for, memorizing or constructing information on their own .

Developing brains and AI

If this can already be happening in adult brains, it’s worth asking what effect it would have on students to use ChatGPT and other similar technologies to brainstorm, summarize, conclude, or reflect on the topics they need to learn.

What happens in the mind of a young university student if they ask artificial intelligence to suggest a topic for analysis, an idea, or an approach to each academic assignment, to generate a summary of a long book they haven’t read, a complex theory they don’t understand, or a set of contributions from authors they won’t review? What happens if we stop consulting sources directly and access only the information synthesized by this technology?

If these systems replace students’ brains’ ability to process, synthesize, and organize information, some experts warn of the resulting “cognitive sedentarism .” Among them, sociologist and researcher Diego Hidaldo wonders if we won’t end up having to go to the gym to train our brains, just as we do with our bodies. David Vivancos, an expert in education and technology, in his book The End of Knowledge warns of the loss of attention and its replacement by AI systems, which diminish human autonomous intelligence.

A system that thinks for us

Two warnings emerge from these studies: the first is the danger of a reversal through atrophy of individual human intelligence, supplanted by artificial intelligence. Students, for the first time in the history of the human species, have at their free disposal a system that thinks for them. The consequence is that they can stop thinking. Given an extension medium, the thousands of students’ brains can stop reading, summarizing, devising, and concluding ideas.

This massive phenomenon can seriously affect young people at the age of intellectual development, especially by supplanting personal ideation, that is, the imagination that creates ideas or approaches. In fact, its effect on reading ability is already being observed .

Information saturation

The second AI reversal is a saturation reversal. When we open Google or any other web search engine today, AI-generated entries literally obscure the ability to find diverse sources of information. The intellectual gridlock generated on the web by AI manifests itself in the impossibility of finding an entry on Google or Edge that isn’t an AI text.

As Freya Holmer , who calls AI a “parasitic cancer,” explains very well , the web is becoming saturated with AI-generated information that discourages us from seeking sources and leads us to a commercialized and conformist knowledge base. AI is making Wikipedia look good , the only source that remains, and which was reviled by experts a few years ago.

If nothing is done, we could find ourselves in the dystopian world of 2001: A Space Odyssey , a film that almost a century ago imagined the dangers of replacing our ability to think, and our intellectual muscle, with an inert prosthesis.

Author Bio: Eva Aladro Vico is Professor of Information Theory at Complutense University of Madrid