The Human Mind Was Lobotomised Long Before AI

As generative artificial intelligence permeates every facet of modern life, a pervasive cultural anxiety has taken root, driven by the fear that AI is dumbing down the human mind. As a regular user of these tools, I find them profoundly helpful and largely disagree with this popular assertion. In fact, I have been pondering this phenomenon for years, and when I finally articulated it, AI speedily generated the peer-reviewed data which confirmed my suspicions.

It must be stated right from the onset that there is indeed one undeniable downside to mass digitisation and AI usage, and it lies in the realm of mnemonic retention. When we continuously outsource our memory and recall to machines, our internal cognitive archives inevitably atrophy. Today, there are adults who have difficulty remembering their own car licence plates, much less the telephone numbers of close friends and associates. Again, this trend began long before the advent of AI in the public domain.

This cognitive surrender is merely the latest chapter in a much longer story. The uncomfortable truth is that the human mind has been systematically dulled, lobotomised, and stripped of its expressive abstraction long before the first neural network was trained. The cognitive decline we now blame on AI is actually the culmination of a decades-long process of cultural, economic, and technological homogenisation that began in the post-WW2 era.

To understand this decline, we must first observe the erosion of lexical depth, specifically in the arenas of popular music and the media.