“The Neanderthal Paradox” - Outer Progress, Inner Regression

 

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When Neanderthals shaped stone into knives and spears, they weren’t just making tools, they were externalizing thought. Each strike against stone reflected judgment, foresight, and risk. A poorly made spear meant hunger or death. Tool making, then, was not convenience, it was cognition made visible. That is why early tools marked a genuine progression in human development where they extended imagination without replacing it.

This raises a troubling question today. If stone tools signalled human ascent, does artificial intelligence signal another evolutionary leap or a quiet regression to a new kind of prehistory, where thinking itself is outsourced?

At first glance, the arc of history seems clear. Tools evolved from survival aids to instruments of comfort, then to systems of efficiency. What began as necessity slowly became desire. Discovery was once driven by hunger and danger, but now it is driven by optimization and convenience. Yet this shift has altered not just what we make, but how we think.

To understand this transformation, it helps to briefly align a few thinkers, not as authorities, but as lenses.

Charles Darwin explains the biological groundwork. From his perspective, tool use is an evolutionary advantage, not a moral or historical turning point. Humans who could cooperate, imagine, and manipulate objects survived better. Tools followed intelligence but they did not direct it. Darwin’s account is powerful but limited as it only explains how tool making emerged, not how tools later came to reorganize human life.

Friedrich Engels fills that gap. For him, labour and tool making were not passive outcomes of evolution but active forces shaping the human hand, brain, language, and society. Tools didn’t just help humans survive but they helped create humans as conscious, social beings. Here, tool making is transformative, not merely adaptive.

Karl Marx extends this insight into history. Tools become “means of production,” and whoever controls them controls social life. Technological progress, Marx argues, restructures society and concentrates power. Tools amplify productivity, but under certain systems they also alienate humans from their own creative capacities. Progress outward, impoverishment inward.

Yuval Noah Harari updates this story for the present. What distinguishes modern humanity, he suggests, is not tools alone but shared imagination, which includes myths, money, laws, and now algorithms. Today’s tools are no longer just physical objects but they are systems of belief encoded in software. AI, financial models, and data infrastructures don’t just assist decision-making but they define what counts as a decision.

At this point, a pattern becomes visible. Human development is not driven by biology alone, nor labour alone, nor economics alone, but by their interaction with imagination. Tools once expanded imagination. Now they increasingly replace it.

Ancient traditions sensed this risk intuitively.

In Indian thought, craft (śilpa) was never just mechanical skill. The Śilpa Śāstras treated toolmaking as disciplined knowledge aligned with cosmic order and ethical purpose. Even Vedic metaphors compared crafting an object to crafting a thought where both acts of mindful construction. Action without reflection was never idealized.

Greek philosophy made this distinction explicit through technē. Plato warned that writing, an early cognitive tool, could weaken memory by externalizing it. Aristotle valued technē but insisted it be guided by phronēsis, practical wisdom. Tools were legitimate only when governed by judgment and ethical ends.

In both traditions, tools were subordinate to inner clarity. Thought preceded action. Skill served wisdom.

Modern technological society reverses this order.

Today, tools do not merely help us think but they structure how thinking happens. Recommendation algorithms decide what we read. GPS decides how we navigate. AI copilots draft our emails, summarize our meetings, and increasingly suggest what decisions to make. None of this is coercive. That is precisely the danger. Dependence arrives disguised as ease.

Martin Heidegger foresaw this condition. He warned that modern technology is not neutral, it “enframes” reality, turning everything, including humans, into resources to be optimized. Under this logic, thinking becomes calculative rather than contemplative. We learn how to operate systems fluently while losing the habit of questioning their purpose.

You can see this everywhere. University students rely on AI not to test ideas, but to avoid struggling with them. Professionals follow dashboards and metrics without understanding what is being measured or why. Social media platforms optimize “engagement,” subtly shaping attention spans, desires, and outrage cycles, while users feel more informed than ever. Judgment hasn’t vanished but it has been deferred.

Hannah Arendt helps explain the moral consequence. In her analysis of thoughtlessness, she showed how responsibility dissolves when individuals stop thinking and start merely following processes. Today’s conformity is not enforced by authority but by systems. “The algorithm recommended it.” “The model decided.” Obedience has become procedural.

Herbert Marcuse sharpens the critique. Technological societies, he argued, produce the “one-dimensional” human, highly capable within systems, yet incapable of imagining alternatives. This is not ignorance but it is a narrowing of possibility. A person may optimize workflows flawlessly and still struggle to ask whether the workflow should exist at all.

Ancient wisdom offers a counterpoint. The Thirukkural insists that action must be preceded by reflection:

“எண்ணித் துணிக கருமம்; துணிந்தபின்
எண்ணுவம் என்பது இழுக்கு.” - Kural 467

“Think carefully before acting; once resolved, wavering is weakness.”

Here, dignity lies in judgment, not execution. When action becomes automated and thought outsourced, efficiency increases, but agency erodes.

This is where the Neanderthal comparison becomes illuminating rather than insulting. Neanderthals lived amid uncertainty. Every tool demanded engagement, improvisation, and risk. Their tools expanded human capability without replacing human responsibility.

Modern humans, surrounded by vastly superior tools, risk becoming cognitively passive. We execute without originating, optimize without imagining, comply without questioning. The regression is not biological, it is existential.

The danger of AI and advanced technology is not that machines will become human like. It is that humans may become machine like, precise, efficient, obedient and inwardly hollow. Civilization advances outward while retreating inward.

True progress is not measured by the intelligence of our tools, but by the vitality of the minds that wield them. When tools assist imagination, humanity advances. When tools replace imagination, humanity regresses, quietly, comfortably, and with great efficiency.

That is the real question before us, where it is not whether AI can think, but whether humans will continue to do so.

Note:

This writing was inspired by my friend Rajender, who poked this question a few days ago.

ravivarmmankkannaiappan@1551110120263.0567° N, 101.5851° E 

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