Enfeeblement by automation and other harmful effects of the cyber world

Tides in the affairs of men

Elon Musk, an individual for whom I have an intense dislike, has grown rich, or apparently so, as the prophet from and advocate of automation. But I begin to wonder if he is really yesterday’s man masquerading as the man of the future. Luddite I may appear to be but I do take to an automated life with as much alacrity as most do.

I have had a sense of unease for quite some time. It plays itself out in the trivial. For instance, it is now common place where I live, as in many places, for cash transactions to be given effect by the wave of a card or a phone. I, like all others, find it convenient. The reason I do is because I don’t have to think as I pay for my groceries. But every now and again I encounter businesses that refuse to meet the cost of this technology. In consequence I am obliged to insert a card and key various numbers to complete the transaction. When I am compelled to revert to an obsolete practice, I have to struggle to remember how to do it. When the practice was routine, I had no difficulty at all. But now it is rare I have to engage my brain more strenuously than before.

There are many examples of increasing severity which I will traverse but I read something recently that amplified my disquiet by orders of magnitude. It is not exactly identical but chilling nonetheless as it shows the detrimental consequences of our headlong rush into surrendering our lives to the machine. The article I read was in the opinion section of the Guardian. The link is here:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/03/psychiatrist-children-smartphones-mental-health-harm

The author is a psychiatrist specialising in children and youth. She refers to the ubiquity of smart phone ownership and usage amongst adolescents as a crisis. She claims that smart phones are drastically undermining the mental health of the young and inflicting severe damage that will cast a pall over their entire lives. I think we all know what she says is intuitively obvious but to have it said so starkly is deeply unnerving. The cell phone screen has become a portal into a cyber hellscape. For lonely children or children with low self-esteem the smart phone provides a substitute for proper friendship that is until self-harm or sexual exploitation rear their ugly heads. We all know that our attention spans have diminished as result of smart phone usage. Of the people who read this, how many will not have been interrupted by an intrusive bleep signalling their attention is required elsewhere?

My enfeeblement brought by ease of payment with the wave of a hand may not be important but it is indicative of a prevalent syndrome across our increasingly mechanised and digitised world. The detrimental effects can be severe. An excellent example occurred in 2009 when Air France flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic. The aircraft was an Airbus A330. Airbus had been pioneers of automated pilotage. Essentially the aircraft flies itself. To do so it requires information about airspeed, attitude to the horizon and so on. In the event the information is denied to its computer the auto-pilot will throw its metaphorical hands up and say to the human pilots: “I give up, over to you”.

Unfortunately, for Flight 447 there was a convergence of unfortunate circumstances. The senior pilot flying the plane, or should we say monitoring its instruments, was out of the cockpit. An inexperienced pilot was then asked by the computer to take control as the instrument sensors had frozen over. It was night and so the horizon was invisible. The sensation coursing through the body of the inexperienced pilot told him the plane was descending. Accordingly, he raised the nose to maintain height. The sensation was the opposite of the true attitude to the horizon so the young pilot exacerbated the problem. The aircraft stalled – lost lift as its nose was too high. The senior pilot realised what was happening and rushed back but was too late. The aircraft plummeted into the ocean.

When engaged on a task such as flying the brain of the actively engaged pilot is matching the sensations to the instruments or visual data from outside. They know what descending, ascending, banking left or right feel like. As an experiment, next time the reader is in an aircraft close your eyes and feel the sensation. You’ll find it’s not all that easy to discern what is happening. The seasoned senior pilot on Flight 447 had probably learnt his flying in unsophisticated aircraft and flown commercial aircraft with less automation. He could feel what was happening. The young pilot clearly had not or had not done enough for the patterns to be embedded. He was, in other words, enfeebled by automation.

Flight 447 is not an isolated incident. Something similar happened to an Air Asia aircraft in 2014. The aircraft was also an Airbus. On this occasion it was an A320. Flight 8501 was scheduled to fly from Java to Singapore. It seems as though a fault in a solder joint interrupted the flow of electricity which disrupted the auto-pilot. Several attempts to reset were unsuccessful. Inadvertently the lead pilot switched the auto-pilot off altogether. The plane soared to a height beyond its normal operating ceiling. It had never occurred to me before but the higher you fly the narrower the margin for error in the maintenance of lift due to the thinner air. In these circumstances the pilots confused themselves when they had to assume control. Their actions caused the aircraft to stall and the pilots could not recover. It fell to the surface at an astonishing rate.

Both pilots were vastly experienced. The command pilot had accumulated over 20,000 hours of flying which is well over 2 years in the air. He had flown military aircraft including F-16s. But that may be the problem. Military aircraft are inherently unstable and reliant upon computers to maintain the aeronautical surfaces in the right place to stay aloft. Aviators talk about flying by the seat of your pants. It means when you fly you are at one with the aircraft. Or more particularly the pilot’s brain is engaged fully in the flight operation. The brain accumulates the experience from active involvement that does not happen when the pilot is passively involved. The accumulated experience is essential when an emergency arises.

There is nothing unique about aviation except for the extremely detailed reports that are compiled following failure. For instance, the relevant Indonesian authority’s report into Flight 8501 is available on line and extends to over 200 pages in length. I suspect enfeeblement by automation is much more widespread than appears but it remains undetected because investigators don’t look for it. In my own field of accounting, I am sure enfeeblement by automation infects the critical function of auditing. It has been nearly 20 years since my accounting was subject to audit. Even then the novices the audit firms sent into the field didn’t really understand the accounting. What they did was work around the accounting proper and feed data into their laptops to test the validity of the external manifestations of the accounting system. I could tell from the questioning to which I was subject that the novice auditors did not understand how the numbers travelled through the accounting labyrinth to their final destination. I would be surprised if the phenomenon I describe has not become much more prevalent and deeply embedded.

Mental faculties or manual dexterity must be like muscle. To not use them is to allow them to waste away. In the eternal quest for relieving ourselves of the burdens of living through endless automation of everything are we not missing the point of life altogether? Gardeners would tell you the purpose of gardening is not to achieve the end product in which nature is bent to the gardener’s will. The pleasure of it is in the gardening itself, the process not the outcome. The techno-wizard Musk seems not to understand such a simple idea. He seems to think that his ever-greater fortune lies in the development of robots.

I suspect that there is some truth in the rumour that Tesla’s robots are more hype than reality. Nonetheless, his seeming strategic thrust is to make robots ubiquitous in home and business. That aim, in my view, is inadvertently life denying. His robots may one day relieve us of household chores. Cleaning up after food preparation and consumption may be the first step. Then it will be food preparation itself. Next will be walking the dog. Absurdity creeps in. I remember reading a while ago about Bill Gates who routinely washed the dishes as it provided mental relief and kept him grounded. What as people are we going to be doing while machines do everything for us?

In all human affairs there are ebbs and flows. I think the mania for automation is reaching its high tide mark and the sea will turn. If I am right then Musk will be left high and dry, flopping around like a dying fish. If I am wrong then I fear for humanity. The prophecy of The Terminator becomes true. Am I the modern-day equivalent of the apocryphal Ned Ludd? Possibly, but then I am writing this essay on a computer. What I am not doing is guiding ChatGPT to do it for me.

I think the case for enfeeblement by automation is a very real phenomenon which must be guarded against. But some forms of automation, or AI if you will, I thoroughly welcome. I read an incisive analysis on Substack of the nature of AI. The essay, which I foolishly failed to save, explained that what we call AI is a feat of memory much like chess or Go playing computers. According to the author chess grand mastery is achieved not by the ability to calculate several moves ahead but by prodigious consumption of past matches. The memory banks of grand masters equip them to anticipate the likely outcomes in most circumstances. That process lends itself to the study and practice of law above all else, certainly in the common law jurisdictions where precedent may potentially be found in billions of cases. I understand that expert legal systems can already predict the outcome of litigation better than seasoned lawyers. I am an enthusiast for automating the legal system and ridding ourselves of a parasitic profession. Think of the rustling sound as the legal professionals become infused with the spirit of Ned Ludd.

Disclosure

More than 50 years ago I learned to fly in a Cessna 172. I am confident that I am one of the worst pilots who ever took to the air solo. Good flyers, like good sailors, are instinctive. You must have the capacity for instant action in a crisis. There is no room for considered contemplation. I was the aeronautical equivalent of Hamlet, too much thinking not enough instinct.