Is your smartphone helping you think, or thinking for you?

We’ve all been guilty of it. You innocently open your phone to reply to an email or check your banking app and somehow end up in a TikTok algorithm-fueled rabbit hole.

According to Associate Professor Rachael Brown from The Australian National University (ANU), that uncomfortable feeling we get when our phones pull us somewhere we never intended to go, is not due to a lack of willpower, but part of a system designed to make digital engagement feel seamless and difficult to disconnect from.

At ANU, Brown is the Director of the Centre for Philosophy of the Sciences. Much of her work examines how technology, culture and human behaviour interact, and how those interactions shape societies over time.

“The lack of friction between ourselves and our phones is both the reason they’re so useful and the reason they’ve become so embedded in our lives,” Brown says.

“And that lack of friction can also be exploited.”

The parasite in your pocket

Brown recently explored the idea that smartphones may behave less like tools and more like parasites in an article for The Conversation, drawing on her paper “Smartphones: Parts of Our Minds? Or Parasites?”, co-authored with evolutionary biologist Professor Robert Brooks.

Likening smartphones to parasites may sound dramatic at first, but Brown isn’t suggesting the answer to your late-night doomscrolling is to throw your smartphone into the ocean and return to flip phones and paper maps. In fact, Brown is quick to point out the enormous benefits smartphones have brought to everyday life.

“Think about all the amazing things they do” she says.  “The changes they’ve made for people with disabilities, for people with diabetes, for accessibility and access to the world. They’re extremely powerful bits of technology.”

The issue isn’t the actual existence of smartphones, but the relationship between users and the companies competing for their attention, a relationship that is becoming increasingly uneven.

“When you’re using your phone, it’s useful to stop and ask: who is benefitting here?” she says. “Am I really benefitting from this interaction, or is someone else benefitting more?”

Much of today’s digital economy is built around attention. Social media platforms are designed to keep users engaged for as long as possible, while simultaneously collecting data about the way you think, behave and live.

“The challenge is that you feel like you’re gaining something the whole time. You’re getting interesting information. You’re connecting with friends. But at the same time, your attention and your information are being exploited,” Brown says.

Smartphones are no longer optional accessories sitting at the edge of our lives. They are extensions of our brains, deeply woven into the fabric of daily life.

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Watch Associate Professor Racheal Brown unpack whether the devices we rely on every day are helping us think more efficiently or outsourcing our thinking altogether.

The AI acceleration

Part of Brown’s research looks at what evolutionary biologists call “cultural fitness traps”, situations where behaviours or technologies become so rewarding and embedded in societies that individuals struggle to opt out, even when there may be negative consequences.

And if smartphones weren’t already changing the ways humans operate, artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating that relationship even further. As generative AI tools become more integrated in our day-to-day lives, the line between technology assisting our thinking and shaping it becomes increasingly blurred.

“It’s really hard to know: are these tools making us dumber, or are they freeing up cognitive space for other tasks?” Brown asks.

Designed to distract

Students, who spend much of their lives online, are potentially facing the harshest implications. The same devices they rely on to access tools for learning are also engineered to compete relentlessly for their attention.

Where possible, Brown encourages students to attend classes in person, rather than relying completely on recordings and online engagement. Partly, this is about being physically present with others again in a post-pandemic world, but it’s also about something much simpler – being able to learn without a device constantly designed to pull your attention elsewhere.

For Brown, the parasite metaphor is not about fearmongering or inciting moral panic. It’s about asking ourselves when we unlock our phones, who is benefiting from this interaction?

Because the most unsettling part of all may be that the relationship feels so natural, we can’t remember the last time we questioned it.