Opinion: If a Lack of Exercise Harms Our Bodies, What Is Reliance on AI Doing to Our Brains?

Devi Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, argues in an opinion piece for The Guardian that society should be cautious about entrusting technology companies with decisions that could have lasting effects on human health and cognition, drawing a comparison between the well-documented harms of physical inactivity and the largely unknown long-term effects of heavy AI use.

Sridhar writes that she suspects nearly all of her students now use AI tools regularly, and says she is concerned about what she describes as their potentially corrosive effects on how people think and interact.

She recalls an experience from her time as a postgraduate student at the University of Oxford in the early 2000s, when she interviewed for a major consulting firm and was asked to speculate about the future of streaming technology. In her answer, she warned about the unintended consequences that new technologies could have on how people interact with one another, questioning at the time why anyone would choose to stay home alone watching shows rather than going out to rent a film or visit a cinema. She notes, with some irony, that she was not invited back for a follow-up interview.

Sridhar frames her concerns about AI as part of a broader pattern in which the health and societal implications of new technologies are often only fully understood well after they have become deeply embedded in daily life.