Are Smartphones Domesticating Us?

We domesticated wolves in 15,000 years. Phones did it to us in 15.

Photo by Omar Prestwich on Unsplash

What if, after 300,000+ years of Homo sapiens (us modern humans) using tools, our tools have started to use us back? There’s evidence they are impacting our physical bodies; curved spines from hunching over our screens, thumbs that can swipe, but struggle to light a match? Then there’s outsourcing cognitive functions to AI chatbots. So the question becomes, isn’t whether smartphones have altered our behaviour; it’s whether we’ve entered the first phase of something more profound: the merger of human and machine consciousness.

Here I look at the fascinating and evolving relationship between humans and smartphones, which for ease of typing I’ll just call mobiles or mobile. What does it mean as AI chatbots come on the scene and the implications for technologies like Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI). I’ll also look at how we may well use culture to redefine this relationship.

We might make a parallel to behavioural modifications and physiological that resemble the domestication of the wolf over 15,000 years ago. But this time, compressed into a generation or two.

One growing impact on our bodies is what’s called “text neck”, which is a change to curvature of our spine from smartphone and tablet usage. Then…