Organic Ignorance in the Age of Machines

Organic Ignorance in the Age of Machines

I remember the film Matrix: the post-apocalyptic scenario in which humans lost to machines, their biological bodies reduced to batteries cultivated in farms. It seems that this prediction was wrong, by very little. We are indeed moving toward the domination of machines, but not through a bloody war. It happens passively, almost invisibly, as human bodies are slowly converted into processors for the infinite content of machines.

It is paradoxical that, at the same time artificial intelligences advance at incredible speed, learning patterns, recognizing forms, creating desires, the human being seems to slowly unlearn what it means to live.

Perhaps my nostalgia for a childhood without screens weighs in here. For a long time, the only electronic device we had at home was the television, and that was not so long ago. Then came cell phones and the internet and, in an ironic, almost tragic way, as machines become more intelligent, the human experience seems to grow more shallow. Not for lack of stimulus or information, but for excess. The experience of what it means to exist as a human being has spread across infinite feeds, fragmented into stimuli that demand no permanence. Gradually, we cease to be active beings and become mere reactive receptacles.

We are witnessing the birth of a new era, dictated by the continuous consumption of simulated presence. We scroll the screen as if we were traversing the world, when in truth we merely orbit images. Illuded by dispersed concentration, we absorb illusions, believing we are living in the present while processing content that soon disappears.

A simple test: after hours in the feed, how much information do we retain? 

Little or nothing is truly absorbed. It is the consumption of an organism that does not digest. In biological terms, it is like feeding on food with no nutritional value, mere substances that guarantee energetic subsistence, producing more waste than absorbing quality.

Perhaps this new world did not originate in digital technology itself, but it was undoubtedly accelerated by artificial intelligences. The human being gradually transforms into organic ignorance: distant from reality, consuming the absurd as truth, manipulated by algorithms that turn politics into memes while confusing opinion with action.

Organic ignorance is a disease, marked by rapid processing and the inability to metabolize. It is the erosion of attention, of prolonged listening, of thought that requires time. While artificial systems operate through deep layers, the human is pushed toward fast surfaces. The deeper the intelligence of machines becomes, the more dispersed the human grows, sliding through reality without truly living it. Never have we produced so much content, and never have we thought so little about what we consume.

If at some point the promise of technology was to free time and redistribute creative power, what we see is the opposite: humans converted into processors, whose primary function is the consumption of rapid data. Subjectivity becomes a living metric, while existence turns into the management of visibility.

This is a new existential paradigm, in which the act of living is the visibility of a social performance. This constant feeling of loneliness is no coincidence. Beyond a side effect, isolation is structural. Human presence is replaced by hyperconnection, simulating the filling of the existential void. We wait for the next notification to give meaning to existence, anxiously awaiting the next update that arrives accompanied by a new sensation.

We have reached a point where the human slowly abdicates its symbolic capacity, while machines learn to simulate it with growing precision. Perhaps the problem is not artificial intelligence itself, but the outsourcing of thought. The belief that understanding can be automated, that creating can be delegated, that feeling can be mediated by more efficient interfaces. By doing so, little by little and continuously, we lose the ability to connect, both with other humans and with nature. We are increasingly capable technically and increasingly unavailable inwardly.

We see so much and everything, yet we give it no proper attention. We are living through the era of “rotted brains,” which is no longer a metaphor. It is a biological adaptation in real time. Entire generations are born within the online, not as a tool, but as an ecosystem. The human body, especially the brain, was not designed for infinite feeds, intermittent rewards, and competing stimuli every second. Still, it tries to adapt.

The dopaminergic system, responsible for motivation, learning, and reward anticipation, does not distinguish meaning from stimulus, only intensity and frequency. Every notification, every short video, every micro-validation activates ancient circuits with new tools. Dopamine ceases to be the consequence of effort and becomes an automatic response to touch. In times of easy dopamine, the tendency is to seek what triggers it, without the effort of construction. The goal no longer needs a path, it is always immediate.

The brain quickly learns that there is no need to go deep to be rewarded. Just scroll. Just react. Just remain on the surface. Over time, cognitive effort becomes too costly. Sustained attention begins to generate physical discomfort. Silence turns into a threat. Long reading feels like anticipated exhaustion. This is our society, suffering from chronic hyperstimulation.

From a biological point of view, this means circuits shaped for immediate gratification and a growing difficulty in sustaining complex processes: abstract thinking, deep memory, unguided imagination. Technological evolution accelerates at an exponential pace, creating an unprecedented biological transformation, brains with metabolic deficits, fueled by easy dopamine.

We return, then, to the image from the beginning of the text. Not only in Matrix, but in other films as well, such as The Terminator, we see narratives about the moment of human defeat through force and oppression. Yet the scenario is different: the human is not being defeated, but voluntarily reprogrammed.

As human beings, we possess an ancient biological apparatus. Much of how we live is still organized by the brainstem and the reptilian brain. High exposure to digital infrastructure represents a biological shock. Technological temporality acts as an amplifier of daily rhythm, optimizing stimuli for already exhausted brains.

And so, while machines learn to simulate creativity, humans unlearn how to sustain desire. Dopamine is depleted before it can turn into meaning. Thought, before it can turn into form. Ironically, contemporary passivity is directed hyperactivity. The body remains still while the mind reacts incessantly. The gesture is reduced to the click, everything happens too quickly to sediment into practice.

From a biological perspective, this is not neutral. The human brain evolved in contact with natural cycles, light, shadow, seasons, physical effort, real scarcity. Today, these cycles are replaced by artificial rhythms: constant updates, blue light, infinite reward. In this duality of discrepancy, the body inhabits a planet while the mind inhabits a system.

We may be facing the birth of a new species, not in the classical Darwinian sense, but a neurocultural one. A human disconnected from the land, yet deeply connected to the machine. An organism that knows more interfaces than forests, more feeds than rivers, more metrics than seasons of the year. The new human is ultra-technological and sensorially impoverished.

It is not that technology distances us from nature, it offers itself as a substitute. A simulacrum efficient enough that we do not immediately miss the real. But biologically, something does not add up. Diffuse anxiety, sadness without clear cause, generalized exhaustion are not individual failures: they are signs of an organism living outside its symbolic and material habitat.

Perhaps the true conflict of our time is between adaptation and meaning. If we are becoming something else, the question is not only what we are becoming, but what we are leaving behind. Because no intelligence, artificial or otherwise, is neutral. It always carries a worldview. And perhaps there is still time to decide whether we want to evolve only in technical power, or also in living depth.