Nicolas Carr addresses this issue directly in his book "The Shallows" in which he brilliantly recounted how media has reshaped how humans think and communicate, especially how the word streams of other people increasingly reshaped our collective focus and our ability to focus, which alas, has NOT freed us to think more deeply.

Humans always have and always will use tech as a crutch -- to reduce time and effort (and energy expended). The 'physical enshittification' (PE) that has ensued from using mechanical crutches has made us lazy, fat, and sick. And now _mental_ crutches have arrived, which promise to replace our very thought processes, freeing us from all the annoying cognitive heavy lifting once done by our brains.

IMO, there's every reason to believe that the next step in human evolution will be driven by the continued misuse of tech as crutches, likely leading to widespread _mental_ enshittification (ME) -- doing to our minds what misuse of tech has already done to our culture and to our bodies.

Perhaps mankind can avoid this fate. But only if we insist on _thinking_ for ourselves.