HOWZAT

Where is it all leading? Only one thing seems clear: changes propelled by the digital world are just beginning. Indeed, one of the markers between the natives and the immigrants — it’s not simply a question of age — is the intuitive acceptance of rapid digital change.

“My parents are as au fait with the internet as I am,” says Nathan Midgley of the TheFishCanSing research consultancy, “but what they are not used to doing is upgrading. They got the internet seven years ago, but they bought it in the way you might have bought a TV 25 years ago: buy it and stick with it. People of my generation are much more used to the turnover of gadgetry. Other generations are left out of the loop in the way it is speeding up.” Faster broadband speeds, easier interfaces, smaller hardware — innovation is happening at such a pace that what was science fiction a few years ago is looming as fact. In experiments, human brain cells, for example, have already been linked directly to computers.

Andy Clark, a former director of cognitive science at Indiana University, believes we should already regard ourselves as cyborgs. Our thinking no longer goes on purely inside our heads, he contends; it is intimately bound up with the tools we use. He illustrates this with the example of people using software to trawl the web for news, music, information and goods personalised to their tastes. Where do the “thinking” and analysis stop? As the interfaces between people and computers become more sophisticated, he believes, “It will soon be harder than ever to tell where the human user stops and the rest of the world begins.”

Will this lead to greater intelligence? Some might argue that is already happening. In what is known as the Flynn Effect, underlying IQ scores — before adjustments to keep the average steady — have been rising for years. Nobody is sure why this is so, though few believe it is simply because we are smarter. “Otherwise you would have to conclude that people 100 years ago were all morons by our standards,” says Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. Instead, the type of thinking we do may have changed. “It may be that there are certain kinds of abstract thinking that we get much more exposure to now, and that might simply make us better at taking IQ tests.”

In the same way, Bostrom has no doubt that digital technology is influencing our mental processes. “Something as massive as our — for many people — daily interaction with computers and video players is bound to have a significant effect.” Anecdotally, it seems a lot of natives in this digital culture are apt at multitasking, doing several things in parallel. But nobody knows exactly what that effect will be. “In a sense it is a grand-scale experiment we are running. We are raising a whole generation in this totally new environment — without any firm evidence of what will happen to them.”