Is Your Cell Phone Making You an Octopus?

We have become cyborgs, combinations of animal and mineral

Technology has changed the world—there is no denying that—but it has also changed us. In some ways, our lives are no different. But in other ways, our orientation toward even the most basic task has radically changed. We may complain that technology, from the cellphone to ChatGPT, is undermining our very humanity. Could this concern be stranger than we think? Could these new tools be changing the nature of our minds to make us more like those of different species?

I Think (Like a Human), Therefore I Am (Human)

When the Industrial Revolution began to churn, science and technology required complex computations. This created a job for those who were mathematically skilled, detail-oriented, and extremely patient to see these algorithms through to a solution. Such people were respectfully referred to as “computers.” When Charles Babbage created his analytical engine and Ada Lovelace created the first program, the tantalizing prospect of having a machine accomplish the tasks of these intelligent human computers necessarily led to the question of whether such machines would themselves be intelligent. After all, they were doing the same work as humans that were.

Alan Turning created an electronic computer to break the supposedly uncrackable Enigma code of the Nazis, a task that the best British cryptologists (all of them human) were unable to accomplish. Computers could suddenly outthink humans. And again, the question popped up whether the machines were, in some meaningful sense, thinking.

In 1950, Turing developed his famous test to answer the question. We begin with two facts about people: (1) we are intelligent, and (2) we have parties. Turing imagined a party game played by a subset of the guests gathered in the living room. Among those not in the living room, another guest is put into a closet, and those in the living room are given a piece of paper on which they will write questions to be slid under the door into the closet, the answer written, and the paper slipped back out. The game is to guess whether the person in the closet is male or female.

Turing then adapted the game to involve a computer with a screen and keyboard. The guessers type questions in, and the answers appear on the screen. The challenge now is to determine whether those answers were provided by another human at a computer terminal in a different room or by a computer. If the guessers get the answer right as often as they get it wrong, then they cannot distinguish between talking to a human and talking to a computer. Since the ability to communicate thoughts is essential to intelligence, any machine that passes the Turing Test would have to be regarded as an example of artificial intelligence.

While there is a robust literature debating the necessity and sufficiency of the Turning Test, we will ignore it because what is important to us is only the first step of the argument. Since humans are intelligent, then anything that is enough like a human must also be considered intelligent. Note that this limits the understanding of intelligence to that which is human-like.

Birds and Octopuses and Ants, Oh My

Image: animalgator.com

There are other species that show fascinating cognitive abilities. Bees can communicate directions. Crows can solve intricate problems. Chimpanzees can fashion tools. Elephants mourn the deaths of friends and relatives. All of these seem to be necessary parts of what it is to be intelligent and scientists and philosophers continue to debate where the line is—or if it is a line at all or rather more of a spectrum—that separates beings who are intelligent from those who are not. But again, notice that the terms of the debate take human intelligence as the hallmark against which to measure. This ignores the fact that there are animals with a very different sort of intellectual nature.

Humans are built with a central nervous system piloted by a big brain. The brain is where observations are constructed from the sensory organs distributed throughout the body. The brain is where sense is made of the world that created those stimuli. The brain is where plans are formulated for moving the body in response to the observations in line with desires and goals. The brain is where the motor impulses that carry out the plan originate. While we are becoming more aware of the role of the gut in cognition, the brain is still the intelligent place it is, our central processing unit, the seat of the mind, and we can examine the brains of bees, crows, chimps, and elephants.

Another example is dogs. Beagles rank near the bottom of dog intelligence tests. Their hallmark is listening to people. Beagles are not the best listeners, but they are the best at escaping closed environments, breaking into whatever to get that locked-away food, and moving chairs next to counters for help up to that ‘crusted whatever it is’ off an inked plate. Beagles are about as trustworthy as a farm goat.

Outside this spectrum of comparisons, we find other animals, such as the octopus, perhaps the most neurodivergent animal on the planet. They are not built according to that centralized model, yet are amazingly intricate cognitive beings. They solve complex problems, use tools, play games, and decorate their homes with pretty shells and sea glass they collect. While an octopus has a brain, the majority of its neurons, about 60%, are located elsewhere, mostly in their arms.

The brain may decide what task to accomplish, but the arms process autonomously to get the job done. Indeed, different arms of the same octopus can have distinct personalities: one more adept, another more playful, yet another more aggressive. Instead of a centralized model of cognition, octopuses have one that is distributed throughout their body, away from their brain, which still plays a crucial part but is not the controlling element, the way the human mind is.

That notion of distributed intelligence becomes even more interesting when we get to animals that act collectively like bee swarms, bird flocks, and schools of fish. In these cases, there are individuals, none of whom would be considered to be intelligent on their own. But the group is capable of acting as if it were a single superorganism. When responding to a threat or, in some cases, actively hunting large game, worker ants, for example, will act collectively as if they were not individuals but rather one single, flexible entity unto itself. The colony is capable of becoming a superorganism, which can act and react to the environment despite not having a single functioning brain, as a general leading the troops and making decisions. Rather, the intelligence of the superorganism is distributed throughout the group.

What we see with these examples of distributed cognition is a different picture of intelligence…or is it?

There’s an App for That

People often refer to the cell phone as their external brain. We used to have the phone numbers and addresses of friends and family memorized, that is, stored in our minds, but now we don’t. Instead, we rely on our phones for this and so much more. Older folks, who are easily seduced by the joys of being a curmudgeon, will complain that kids these days are lazier and dumber because of the effects of these technologies. Just as our parents told us that television was wasting our brains, so too do we say that of cell phones to this generation.

But is it that our intelligence is getting weaker or could it be something more profound, that it is changing type? Could our cell phones be making us into octopuses? We still have a brain that decides what we want to do, but often, accomplishing the task is turned over to an application on the phone. The app contains code that interacts with the world and figures out how to do the work that is required of it.

Each app has a different personality, a different approach to the world, and a different approach to accomplishing tasks. In the smartphone era, we are no longer centralized cognitive beings. Rather, we are now distributing our intellectual load, sharing the weight between the organic brain-focused part of us and the rectangular, electronic digital part of us. We have become cyborgs, combinations of animal and mineral, natural and artificial, seamlessly combined into a single entity throughout which the mental capacity is spread.

Teachers everywhere are panicked about large language models like ChatGPT and their impact on education. Students immediately input exam prompts into the bot, resulting in professors grading twenty-seven identical answers to their essay questions. The large language model was trained on information from people. It then synthesizes this information and outputs it to users, enabling collective efforts to accomplish complex tasks like writing a philosophical essay. However, parts of the collective struggle to articulate the details of their shared work. In other words, similar to ants, the knowledge resides in the whole, but not in any individual part.

So, the technology we use is changing how we think. That is not unexpected. But turning us into octopuses and bugs? That is something straight out of Franz Kafka. Here, we find some of us ‘octopusing,’ looking up the Kafka reference on a smartphone.