But if you look at the negative impact that excessive screen-time has had on health and wellbeing, especially on children<\/a>, perhaps I wasn\u2019t wrong after all. We know that social isolation is now widespread, anxiety and depression too, with sleep also negatively affected<\/a> by how late we stay up watching content.<\/p>\n And here I am, more than 20 years later, being asked to talk about AI and what it means for higher education, health and society at a conference at the University of Edinburgh, where I work as a professor. I know many people would say: \u201cIt\u2019s wonderful! Our lives will all get easier.\u201d But we\u2019re also moving closer to a world where we don\u2019t have to see anyone, move anywhere or use our brains, seemingly at all. And again I think, wonderful for who? Wonderful for the tech companies and those looking to cut costs by replacing humans with automation, but certainly not for the rest of us.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a comparison, for me, between the effects of streaming on our physical activity levels and health, and the probable effects of AI on our brains. The richer a country becomes, the more people move into non-manual labour, with sedentary activities in their free time. We can see evidence for this if we look at development in low- and middle-income countries: physical activity goes down as GDP per capita goes up<\/a>. Over the past few decades<\/a>, we have seen the health consequences of sedentary behaviour grow: higher rates of chronic disease such as cancers and type-2 diabetes, more chronic back and neck pain, and reduced quality of life. Physical movement has become a leisure activity to stay healthy, and is increasingly linked with higher socioeconomic status in places such as the UK.<\/p>\n We know that not using our bodies is bad for our physical health \u2013 but what is regular reliance on AI doing to our minds? The true causal evidence might take decades to emerge, but we can link several trends together to guess at an answer. We know, for example, that AI use and daily screen-time averages are going up<\/a>. At my university, I\u2019d guess almost all students are using some kind of generative AI (gen AI) to produce their work, raising huge challenges when it comes to assessment.<\/p>\n The 2026 Higher Education Policy Institute survey<\/a> of students\u2019 use of gen AI found this year that 95% of undergraduates reported using AI in at least one way, and 94% said they had used it in assessed work. We also know that overall educational attainment levels are decreasing: a recent OECD report<\/a> noted that student performance across its member countries continued to decline, with the lowest average ever recorded for maths and reading. The report links these poor scores to longer screen-time, increased digitalisation in the classroom and the collapse in reading for enjoyment<\/a> among children.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n Sign up to Matters of Opinion<\/p>\n Guardian columnists and writers on what they\u2019ve been debating, thinking about, reading, and more<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n All of this makes me wonder what will happen to our brains as we continue to outsource key cognitive functions to AI. We already have preliminary evidence from a study that used electroencephalography (EEG) sensors to measure electrical activity in the brain, titled Your Brain on ChatGPT<\/a>: it showed those students using gen AI to write essays had weaker and less distributed brain connectivity than those writing fully on their own.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/1790336293_444_Matters_of_opinion_11.jpg\")
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