The Problem With the Brain-as-Computer Meme
Ever notice how tech CEOs love comparing your brain to a computer? Elon Musk has called the brain a "biological computer," while Google’s Demis Hassabis views it as a "biological approximation to a Turing machine." It sounds smart, but real talk: the AI industry is lowkey pushing a model of the human mind that is totally warped.
This "computational model" suggests our brains are just algorithms: Input -> Computation -> Output. But according to neuroscientist Paul Cisek from the University of Montreal, this is a massive oversimplification.
Rethinking How We Work
Cisek argues that brains aren't just processing information—they are feedback-control systems. Think about catching a baseball in the outfield. The "computational" view says your brain is doing complex physics calculus to predict the ball's trajectory. Cisek’s "feedback" view says you’re just using a simple rule: keep the ball steady in your visual field and move to maintain that view.
This isn't just semantics; it’s biology. Over millions of years, our nervous systems evolved to help us navigate the world and exercise control over our environment. The computational model tries to reverse-engineer our brains, but it ignores the evolutionary history that actually shaped us.
Why AI Feels Like Junk Food
This brings us to the biggest vibe check: Big Tech is building AI that treats us like data-processing machines, not living, breathing organisms that need real-world interaction.
Humans evolved to learn through imitation, social norms, and shared rituals—basically, deep feedback loops with other people. When AI companies shove their products into our culture, they’re essentially feeding us "cognitive junk food." It’s easy and tempting in the moment, but it’s actually undermining the healthy, social systems we’ve spent millennia perfecting. They’re stripping away the very mechanisms that make us human, and honestly, the plot thickens as they try to replace our complex biological connections with algorithmic outputs.
Why it matters
If we keep letting tech companies build tools based on a broken understanding of how our brains work, we risk damaging the essential social and environmental feedback loops that keep us functioning. AI isn't just tech—it's a massive experiment on human cognition that we didn't sign up for.
