Deskilling the body: We are doing less sensing, navigating, remembering, walking

Digital tools can make everyday life easier while gradually weakening the abilities they replace. The essay describes reliance on phones, email, AI and GPS as a form of bodily deskilling: people do less navigating, remembering, sensing, walking and sustained attention, and may lose the practice through which these skills develop. Algorithms can also replace exploration with recommendations and turn deliberate choices into compulsive habits. The concern is not technology itself, but the difference between tools that extend human capacities and tools that repeatedly substitute for the actions that build them. Greater productivity can have a physical cost, too, when digital work keeps people seated and crowds out time outdoors.

This argument challenges the longstanding idea that humans are essentially minds operating bodies like machines. Drawing on biology, it presents living organisms as self-maintaining systems whose intelligence arises from bodily activity and adaptation, not from abstract information alone. Genes matter, but bodily functions emerge from the organisation of the whole living system. Even thirst begins with physical changes in neurons that guide behaviour before conscious decision-making. The body therefore does not merely carry out the mind’s instructions: it senses, evaluates needs and produces purposeful action. Treating it as replaceable hardware risks undermining the very capacities that make thought and agency possible. In trying to escape bodily limits through automation, people may instead become less able to regulate themselves and respond to the world.