Cognitive Vestigialization

 

When we speak of evolution, 

we tend to think of forward movement.

It isn’t the case always. 

Evolution also forgets. 

It moves on and removes things we no longer need. 

The appendix. Wisdom teeth.

Vestigial organs are reminders that nature is ruthlessly practical. 

Anything repeatedly left unused eventually fades into irrelevance.

This thought, along with watching Silo, made me wonder 

what parts of ourselves are we allowing to be vestigial. 

Not physical, this time. Cognitive.

Writing itself was once accused, by Socrates, of atrophying memory. 

Now that we have tablets and keyboards, the elegance of 

handwriting has started fading - alas, the cursive. 

Calculators came, and mental math became optional for those 

of us who'd already decided we were lazy. 

Chips in computers and smartphones remembered what 

we no longer cared to memorise - birthdays, phone numbers, even the way home. 

Lassie now has an AirTag 

The blank page that used to be the starting point of penning something down is absent. 

Instead, there's the bar for the prompt. Even a half-formed, half-baked, 

grammatically wrong sentence comes back with an unnatural gloss.

Musk, Altman tells us these AI tools are here to free us up for "bigger thinking." 

Somewhere in there, the bigger thinking stopped showing up too.

If we stop exercising our memory, memory weakens - just like our muscles. 

If we stop questioning, curiosity dulls - just like our vision.

If we stop imagining, creativity atrophies - just like our hearts.  

Don't think our brains will disappear – what will remain 

will be a small structural memory of who we used to be.

It isn't dangerous that AI is becoming AGI. 

It's that we have become intellectually sedentary.

And it isn't happening in isolation.

We eat fruits without seeds. 

Monocultures replacing biodiversity. 

A handful of companies now control most of the world's seed supply - 

patented, engineered, often deliberately seedless - 

so the food chain itself runs through a few corporate gatekeepers 

rather than through the land or the farmer.

Our minds are in the same daldal. 

Convenience first, dependency quietly following behind it, 

and control consolidating in fewer and fewer hands while 

the rest of us stop noticing we've handed it over.

We are slowly losing our ability to regenerate independently - 

whether as ecosystems or as societies.

Sometimes I wonder whether our future will resemble the worlds 

imagined in The Handmaid's Tale, Silo or Paradise. 

Not because dystopias arrive overnight. 

But because they arrive one convenience at a time. 

One surrendered skill. One unquestioned technology. One forgotten freedom.

Evolution doesn't always take something away. 

Sometimes, we willingly stop using it.

And one day we wake up to discover that the 

most vestigial organ wasn't the appendix.

It is our capacity to think for ourselves.