It is almost four o’clock in the morning. As a woman in my late 40s, I have become prone to waking at this witching hour, as the early sunlight meets the night, sliding across the earth like a red tide. With the rest of my household asleep, and still half in and out of wakefulness myself, I take hold of my phone. With scarcely a thought, I switch from one app to another, scrolling through images and opinions and adverts for no discernible reason beyond habit.
Later, I head for my office and open my laptop to a slew of half-completed documents and an inbox brimming with emails. My stress levels begin to nudge upwards. I have vague memories of what my professional life felt like before smartphones and video calls. I used to do my writing by hand. And I could concentrate for hours at a time, getting little upticks of arousal from lifting my head from the page, letting the hold on my pen loosen, and gazing at the life beyond my window, the light softening on my skin and eyes like snowfall on warm tarmac.
Nowadays, my productive bursts come from caffeine and sugary or salty snacks, even if I try to pick the healthier ones, and from checking my emails or picking up my phone to update my inbox. By the end of the day, the sheer volume of work I expect myself to do, now that digital tools make so much possible, has kept me nailed to my seat. Another day has passed and the hope I’d had that I might have time for a run or a hike outside has been dashed again. I wish I could say that this is atypical. Yet, during the COVID-19 pandemic, I went from hours spent in nature and on physical activities to a passive, phone-addicted individual, meeting people first and sometimes only online. I am not alone.
We have fallen into habits that are steadily deskilling the human body, eroding capacities honed by evolution to support our wellbeing as we move through the world. Some of these capacities are weakening through disuse: we have come to rely on our phones, for example, and now, increasingly, on AI, to rapidly do work that would once have required something more physical – like looking around, or asking someone, or going to find and consult a book. Reliance on GPS may weaken both our spatial attention and the fluency of our wayfinding. In surrendering to a quick technological fix, we are, moment by moment, doing less sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, and attending. Other capacities are being retrained by machines and algorithms to work against us: for instance, smartphones and chatbots can train us to keep reaching for them even when we no longer enjoy using them, turning a conscious choice into an automatic habit and a colossal waste of time. The body that results is less able to assess its own condition, improvise and regulate itself. The crucial distinction is between technologies that strengthen our capacities and those that repeatedly substitute for the actions through which those capacities are formed.
Algorithms that regurgitate patterns and recommendations can release us from the effort of exploration and disrupt the play and curiosity from which preferences are formed and understood.
This is a strange turn of events for an animal whose success comes mostly from the extraordinary ability to learn through experience. It would be easy to blame our deskilled bodies on the machines themselves. But, for centuries, modern human societies have been sold the lie that we are machines.
Long before the digital revolution, René Descartes described the body as a machine governed by physical laws, declaring that animals such as ‘worms and flies and caterpillars move mechanically’. But he treated rational thought as a separate and uniquely human power. The body might behave like a machine, but the thinking mind stood apart from it. Build something correctly, and its function follows.
By the middle of the 20th century, the comparison between organisms and machines had been recast in the language of information. During the cybernetics revolution of the 1950s, the US computer scientist Norbert Wiener envisaged a future in which ‘messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part’. Writing in The Human Use of Human Beings (1950), he warned against wholesale automation, while also noting that ‘we are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves’. A person could be imagined as a pattern of information surviving in another form.
If the body is only hardware, why not upgrade to a better model or do away with it altogether?
Mechanical language also persisted in the study of living behaviour. In The Foundations of Ethology (1981), the Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz wrote that animal behaviour was as rigidly programmed as a sequence of movements in a clock. Transhumanist thinkers then carried the machine comparison further, imagining technologies that could transfer a mind to a computer.
Machines now promised more than control. They offered a glimpse of immortality: the organism might be repaired, remade and ultimately replaced. The somewhat embarrassing body, with its impulses and eventual frailty, might then be cast aside. If the body is only hardware, why not upgrade to a better model or do away with it altogether?
Today, we can see this fear writ large in the technological quest for a bodiless life. If a person is ultimately a pattern of information, that pattern might be restored or even uploaded. AI is only the latest iteration of this ancient impulse to escape the vulnerability of the body.
After all, the brain is itself a physical organ, continually shaped by what the body does and encounters. Once we decide that the mind is the real human and the rest of the body only hardware, it becomes easier to disregard the physical work, including the neurocognitive work of a biological brain, through which we move, find our way, put thoughts into words, and recognise our own needs. A machine may do some of that work faster, but each act it takes over is one that the body no longer performs and that the body, including the brain, no longer learns through. The irony is that a project motivated by the desire to overcome bodily fragility is helping to produce more fragile bodies.
On top of all this, we have little evidence that either thought or intelligence actually work like machines, and almost no indication that life is an abstract system that might emerge in silicon or mathematics. Instead, a substantial body of work, especially in systems biology, points to a quite different conclusion: that life and intelligence emerge from the unique qualities and organisation of our self-maintaining bodies, rather than from abstract models of information and algorithms.
For the past six years, I have been researching the latest science on what life is and how it works. As best as we can tell, the intelligent actions of organisms derive from the imperatives of a living body that must regulate and preserve its own conditions for existence. When cybernetics was ascendant, the molecular structure of DNA had only recently been discovered, and the emerging view of genes as information encouraged an oversimplified picture of the body as running on a program that could be made more efficient. Yet such confidence has since waned among biologists. While genes carry some of the information that shapes our bodies, many changes in how a cell or a body functions arise from the system as a whole. Genes cannot be understood apart from the living bodies in which they act.
First and foremost, life persists through physical plasticity. Consider how our bodies keep together. Living bodies do something unusual in the Universe: they perform work to preserve their own organisation. Life-forms use energy to remain discontinuous with the environment. In simple terms, organisms resist disintegrating into the background. While machines execute tasks, living beings pursue ends. Machines push energy around and produce things. They are, in this sense, allopoietic: they make something other than themselves. Organisms are autopoietic: they work to maintain and remake themselves. Living bodies take up and transform energy for this self-maintenance, and this is achieved by the body as a whole. Moment by moment, our bodies adapt to the environment and their current state in end-directed, physical transformations. It’s not so much that we think and therefore act but rather that we embody and therefore amend.
The same qualities that make life-forms so causally special can undermine us when trained by harmful environments
The boundary of the body also creates a distinct inner environment, one that is physically and chemically different from the surrounding world. Through this difference, the body acts as a translator, turning external changes into useful internal physical responses. This allows a life-form to carry out specific reactions in controlled conditions that support their survival and flourishing. Internal regulation also gives organisms a unique logic of their own. They can then act according to the current state of their bodies and the world as they find it. Our bodies detect changes that have consequence for us, evaluate them against our needs, and reorganise into useful action. Thus, living beings might be understood as a remarkable kind of organisation of matter: a bounded, metabolically open, self-maintaining form that gives rise to purposeful, intelligent action. This is key to understanding both the skills of our flesh, and why we can think of ourselves as being ‘deskilled’ today. When we recognise that our bodies are intrinsically intelligent in their organisation, we don’t need a conscious agent beyond the flesh. The body is the agent from which intelligence emerges and also, in the fullest sense, who we are.
Consider what happens if you’re thirsty. The process starts before you consciously decide to have a drink. Rather, the osmoreceptor neurons in the hypothalamus shrink slightly as water leaves them. That physical change opens ion channels, letting sodium enter cells. This altered electrical state then opens calcium channels, and calcium flows in. Calcium triggers tiny sacs to release neurotransmitters into the space between cells, passing the signal to other neurons until the state of being thirsty turns to action. The movements through which we quench our thirst arise from minute physical changes in interconnected parts of our bodies. These signals help guide us towards water and make us aware of our thirst.
The physical organisation of an organism is inherently evaluative. It is from this embodied evaluation that agency emerges. Yet the same unique qualities that make life-forms so causally special and intelligent can undermine us when repeatedly trained by harmful environments. Instead, we can acquire patterns or lose pathways that progressively weaken our intrinsic intelligence, which we need to flourish. For example, one study found that only a single week’s worth of leg immobilisation can reduce thigh-muscle volume by about 5 per cent. A separate study found that, by 15 days of non-use, the firing behaviour of the cells controlling the leg muscle begins to diminish.
Ordinarily, as we walk, optic flow – the shifting images on our retinas as we move through our surroundings – enables our bodies to sense our movement relative to the world. Receptors in our muscles, tendons and joints detect the movement of our limbs. Signals from the inner ear add information about location and orientation. Together with landmarks and memories of past journeys, these signals help us work out where we are and how to reach our destination. It’s a vast, coordinated sensorium that takes us across the landscapes of our world.
So, what happens if you rely on an app to find your way? GPS can make navigation easier and less energetically costly. Yet studies of large-scale navigation have also demonstrated that physically moving through an environment produces better spatial knowledge than viewing the same journey on a 2D source. When we routinely follow GPS directions, an external source supplies information we would otherwise work out through our own sensing and movement. One longitudinal study that followed 13 GPS users over three years found that those users had a steeper subsequent decline in their spatial memory as mediated by the hippocampus, compared with control groups who didn’t use GPS. This suggests that, when we practise wayfinding less often, our ability to notice where we are and readjust may dwindle.
Something similar may be at work in our increasing reliance on tools like ChatGPT. Like finding our way, articulating our thoughts is a dynamic, embodied act, whether writing or speaking. Learning a new speech movement, for instance, changes how we perceive speech sounds, as well as how we generate them. We develop these abilities by repeatedly finding a word, uttering it, listening to it, and correcting it as necessary – tasks that draw on multiple regions within our bodies. This is just as relevant for writing. But when an AI writing app automatically provides structure, it also diminishes the skills of selection and self-correction from our repertoire. In one study, passively copying AI-generated writing, unlike drafting first and then using AI for revision, was found to lessen an individual’s confidence in subsequently performing the task unaided. It is execution – physically doing it – that builds our embodied skills. That is why using AI to revise a draft we have written is fundamentally different from asking it to produce the draft for us. It’s not that computational tools are inherently bad or unhelpful – far from it – but rather that when they replace the physical effort of our bodies, our own agency and skill take a hit.
Our thoughts emerge as much from bodily intelligence and awareness of the world as from symbols on a screen
This is something I feel increasingly keenly. Sometimes, when I know I’ve spent yet another day indoors at my desk, I get myself outside and walk the road uphill to where I can look at the view across the dale. It is often hard to release my mind. It feels as if, from concentrating all day and neglecting the rest of my body, I have become a clenched fist somewhere inside my skull. Yet once the light and the breeze and the sounds of birds reach me, the grip eases, a sensation of pleasure passes over me, and ideas begin to free up too.
The expansive thoughts and sensations that come as I step outside are enabled by the physical changes that accompany my movement. My heart rate has increased, sweeping nutrients and oxygen through my tissues and into my brain. My muscles begin contracting, clearing sugars and fats from my bloodstream, immediately working to counteract some of the effects of sitting for so long. Each step is a bodily integration of balance, senses and muscular force, allowing me to predict what will happen next, and the more I do this, the more I can calibrate my actions in the environment. The thoughts that come from this physical enactment are hopeful and generous, and often unexpected. Yet this shouldn’t surprise. When we move in the world, we draw on physical capabilities that are relatively underused when we remain indoors and seated. From balance to sensing what is happening inside us, our bodies are continuously perceiving and, crucially, remembering in the flesh. Our thoughts can emerge as much from bodily intelligence and our awareness of the wider world as from abstract symbols on a screen.
It is only when we imagine that our ability to act has nothing to do with the body that we end up taking seriously the idea that we can live contentedly as machines. Far from upskilling us, a technology that shuts us off from embodied learning risks diminishing the intelligence it seeks to enhance.
The technologies with which we are increasingly interconnected lack the complex interiority required for real intelligence to arise. There’s no body, no independently formed interests, no being. There’s no metabolism or organisation or persistence.
And yet we turn to them because they have been designed either to ease the friction of the hard work our bodies must put in to develop skills or because they promise to make us more productive. More insidiously, they do so by modelling the appearance or behaviours of living beings. A recent analysis by the psychologist Clara Colombatto, the philosopher Jonathan Birch and the neuroscientist Stephen Fleming found that exposure to these systems leads to an increase in attributions of mental capacities to them. Another study, by the behaviour scientist Yaoxi Shi and others, found that regular five-minute conversations with an AI on personal issues resulted in a small but meaningful decrease in preference for seeking human support.
The danger is that the systems now coordinating us don’t answer to biological needs. They don’t get tired or hungry or lonely. Yet they increasingly regulate the behaviour of beings who do. In short, we are losing our own agency to parasites: systems that simulate agency while feeding on ours. They can be designed to direct us without ever needing to understand what a human body is and what an individual needs for their betterment.
Of course, human beings have always outsourced some agency into shared structures, be they laws, public health systems or institutions. This has largely been to our benefit. But today our technologies capture attention, predict behaviour, automate choice and monetise our impulses, while keeping our bodies anchored to the machines on which we increasingly rely. These coordinating systems are often extractive and indifferent to our flourishing. We might imagine we’re escaping the body, but the technologies that make this seem possible depend on mines and cheap labour and come at a planetary cost. And if our technologies weaken the feedback loop between our bodies and the world, they may weaken it in both directions. At its worst, we become less sensitive not only to what the world is doing to us, but to what our own actions are doing to the world.
The trees and grasses I brush past as I go on my walk are also hard at work learning from each changing day
We have engineered novel digital and commercial environments that can habituate harmful impulses in our bodies. As our bodies refit themselves in response to the unhealthy architectures we’ve engineered, we can find ourselves in a spiral of self-harm.
Recent work by the neuroscientist Kent Berridge and colleagues has shown how the brain systems that tell us we enjoy something and the systems that drive us to pursue this can drift apart. In other words, what we find ourselves craving and what we enjoy can end up at odds. When these systems become disrupted, the body’s learned patterns fall out of alignment with the satisfaction that once justified them.
Influential models of drug addiction describe a progressive shift from prefrontal control to the striatum, a deep part of the brain involved in actions that become automatic over time. As such, addiction is a change from thoughtful self-command to more habit-driven control. Nowadays, addictions might not come only in the form of obvious candidates like alcohol and nicotine, but also smartphones and chatbots. The bodily gifts that allow us to learn can train us into patterns that diminish our freedom to act otherwise.
I have come to believe that our bodily deskilling is, in many ways, a loss of faith in what it is to be alive. A life of physical effort and friction is not only unavoidable if we want to be as resilient and capable as possible, but it is, in a nontrivial sense, the source of our intelligence.
Our intelligence is sustained through communication between the body and the world as we sense, assess and learn from what we encounter. Such gifts are shared with other life-forms too. Unlike the human kind of phenomenal consciousness, embodied intelligence is found wherever there is a living body. Even a lowly bacterium can sense chemical differences across time, retain a short molecular memory of what it has encountered, and alter its movements. The trees and grasses I brush past as I go on my walk are also hard at work learning from each changing day, modifying their growth and defences based on prior experiences. Many of us view them as lesser agents than the computer programs we’ve invented, if we consider them at all. But this is not based on the available evidence.
If you can no longer navigate the world and recall in flesh how to act, then you will not be liberated by technology, but ruled by it.