There is a tendency to think about human beings as organisms adapting to an environment that already exists. The climate changes, resources move, new risks appear, and we respond. In that picture, the world presents the conditions and human beings learn how to live within them.
That is only half of the story.
Humans do not simply adapt to environments. We alter them, organise them and increasingly manufacture them. We build houses to remove ourselves from weather, roads to change distance, clocks to standardise time, writing to preserve memory, institutions to stabilise social behaviour and machines to extend physical capability. Once these things exist, they stop being external additions to human life. They become part of the environment to which the next generation must adapt.
The scale of this process is difficult to appreciate until it is measured.
In 2020, a team led by Emily Elhacham and Ron Milo published an unusual calculation in Nature. They estimated the total dry mass of human-made objects — buildings, roads, concrete, bricks, asphalt, machines and other manufactured material — and compared it with the total biomass of all living organisms on Earth. Their conclusion was that humanity had reached a remarkable crossover point: the mass of human-made material had become comparable to, and was beginning to exceed, the mass of all living biomass on the planet. They estimated that anthropogenic mass had been doubling approximately every twenty years and that, averaged across the human population, more than a person’s bodyweight in new human-made mass was being produced every week. (Nature)
The significance of this finding is not that concrete somehow matters more than biology. It is that it gives physical scale to something we often discuss abstractly. Humans have become extraordinarily effective at reconstructing the conditions in which they themselves live.
Evolutionary biology has a name for the broader process: niche construction.
The conventional image of evolution emphasises how environments exert pressures on organisms. Niche-construction theory adds the reverse direction of causation. Organisms also modify their environments, and those modified environments subsequently influence the organisms living within them. Beavers change waterways by constructing dams; birds create nests; earthworms transform soil. Human beings do the same thing, but our capacity for cumulative culture, social learning and technology makes the process unusually powerful. Research on human niche construction describes a feedback loop in which human behaviour alters ecological and social conditions, while those altered conditions influence subsequent behaviour, development and, over longer periods, evolutionary pressures. (PMC)
Agriculture is perhaps the clearest historical example. Humans did not simply discover an environment containing farms. They created agricultural environments through domestication, irrigation, land clearing, settlement and the organisation of food production. Those changes then transformed human diets, settlement patterns, social structures and biological selection pressures. The well-studied relationship between dairying and the evolution of adult lactase persistence is one example of this feedback: a cultural practice altered the environment in which human populations lived, and that environment subsequently changed the selective advantage of particular biological traits. (PMC)
The interesting point is not confined to evolution over thousands of years.
The same basic relationship exists throughout ordinary human life. We create an environment to make a task easier, and then our behaviour changes because that environment exists.
A written calendar is a simple example. Once appointments are reliably stored outside our heads, we no longer need to remember every date in the same way. Street signs change what a traveller needs to memorise. A calculator alters which parts of a calculation need to be performed mentally. Maps allow knowledge of a route to be represented outside the traveller. Writing itself transformed the relationship between knowledge and memory by allowing information to persist independently of the person who originally knew it.
In each case, the tool does more than perform a task. It changes the cognitive environment in which the task takes place.
This idea became particularly influential in cognitive science through work on distributed cognition. Edwin Hutchins’ Cognition in the Wild examined navigation aboard a naval vessel and argued that the cognitive work involved could not be adequately understood by looking only inside the head of one navigator. Navigation emerged from interaction between people, instruments, charts, procedures and representations. The cognitive system was larger than any individual participant. (MIT Press Direct)
This is a useful correction to the intuition that thinking happens entirely inside the brain and technology merely supplies information to it. Human beings have always thought with things: paper, diagrams, rulers, lists, symbols, machines and other people.
Andy Clark and David Chalmers pushed this idea further in their influential 1998 paper The Extended Mind. Their argument was philosophical rather than an experimental finding, but it posed a question that became central to later discussions of cognition and technology: if an external resource is reliably integrated into the way a person remembers, reasons or acts, where exactly should we draw the boundary of the cognitive system? (OUP Academic)
The arrival of networked digital technology makes that question far more practical.
Consider memory.
In 2011, Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu and Daniel Wegner published four experiments in Science examining how access to online information might affect remembering. Their results suggested that when people expected information to remain available later, they were less likely to remember the information itself and relatively better at remembering where it could be found. The authors described the Internet as functioning in some circumstances like a form of external or transactive memory. (PubMed)
The important interpretation is not that search engines destroyed human memory. That would go far beyond what the experiments established. What the study suggests is more interesting: when the information environment changes, people may redistribute what they devote memory to.
If information can be retrieved reliably, knowing where to find it can become more useful than remembering every detail.
That is very similar to what people have always done socially. In a group, one person knows finances, another knows engineering and a third knows the customer. An individual does not need to contain all of the knowledge possessed by the group; part of effective collaboration is knowing where relevant knowledge resides.
Digital technology dramatically enlarges that possibility.
We now carry devices that provide external memory, navigation, communication, calculation, photography, translation and access to an enormous amount of recorded knowledge. Increasingly, artificial-intelligence systems add another layer: they do not merely retrieve information but transform it, summarise it, generate alternatives and participate in tasks that previously required more direct human reasoning.
It is tempting at this point to say simply that technology is “rewiring our brains.” That phrase is popular, but the scientific evidence requires more care.
A major review by Henry Wilmer, Lauren Sherman and Jason Chein examined research on smartphones and cognition, particularly attention, memory and reward-related behaviour. The authors found meaningful evidence that interaction with smart devices can influence cognitive performance in particular situations, while also stressing that the research base was not strong enough to support many broad claims about permanent changes to cognitive capacity. Much of the literature was correlational, results differed between studies, and long-term effects remained uncertain. (Frontiers)
That caution is important.
We do not need the dramatic claim that every new device permanently changes the brain in order to recognise something more straightforward and much better supported: technology changes the environment in which cognition occurs.
And when the environment changes, behaviour changes with it.
A person using GPS approaches navigation differently from someone navigating entirely from memory. A worker with instant access to company knowledge does not need to remember the same things as an employee dependent on paper manuals. A manager with real-time operational data can make decisions on a different timescale from one who receives a monthly report. An employee working inside a system that automatically presents the next required action behaves differently from someone who must remember the entire procedure.
The technology has not simply accelerated the same task. It has changed what the human participant needs to perceive, remember and decide.
Research on human tool use increasingly treats this relationship as reciprocal. We design technologies around human goals and capabilities, but repeated interaction with those technologies then influences how tasks are performed and how cognitive work is distributed. A 2018 interdisciplinary review described this explicitly as a relationship in which humans shape technology while technology shapes human cognitive activity in return. (PMC)
This brings us to a consequence that is easy to overlook when discussing contemporary software.
A digital product is not merely an object delivered into an unchanged organisation.
Once it is adopted, it becomes part of the environment in which people work.
An ERP system determines more than where records are stored. It helps define which states of a commercial process are visible and which are difficult to represent. A workflow system does more than move tasks between users; it influences when responsibility transfers from one person to another. A dashboard does more than display information; it affects which measurements receive attention. A CRM does not merely remember customer data; it partly determines what the organisation is capable of remembering about a customer. An AI assistant does not simply produce an answer faster; depending on how it is integrated, it can change what a person needs to know, verify or decide independently.
This is why the design of technology has consequences beyond functionality.
The moment a system becomes part of daily work, people start adapting to it.
If a field is mandatory, employees learn that the organisation considers that information important. If a system makes one action easy and another difficult, behaviour gradually follows the path built into the interface. If a workflow hides context from the next person in the chain, people invent workarounds outside the system. If automation becomes reliable, people may stop maintaining the skills required to perform the same task manually. If alerts become too frequent, they become part of the background and can lose the ability to attract attention.
The organisation and the technology begin changing one another.
This is, in a much shorter timeframe, structurally similar to the larger niche-construction process. Humans create an environment in response to existing needs. The new environment changes the pressures, choices and behaviours of the humans living within it. They then modify the environment again.
Software has made that cycle extraordinarily fast.
A road network may take decades to transform a city. A widely deployed digital system can change a company’s daily behaviour within months. A communication platform can change expectations about response time. Search can change expectations about access to knowledge. Mobile devices can change what it means to be reachable. Generative AI may now be changing assumptions about which intellectual tasks must begin with a blank page and which begin with a machine-generated first draft.
The details of those effects still require careful research, and many of the strongest public claims about technology and the brain run ahead of the available evidence. But the broader principle is difficult to avoid.
We build tools in order to change our environment.
Then we live and work inside the environment we have built.
For anyone designing technology, that should change the question.
It is not enough to ask whether a system performs the requested function. We should also ask what kind of behaviour the system will make easier, which knowledge it will move outside the individual, which decisions it will make more visible, which assumptions it will embed and what people will eventually stop doing because the technology now does it for them.
A product may solve the problem for which it was designed and still create an environment with consequences nobody originally intended.
This is why at SKWD we are interested in the problem before the technology. Once software enters an organisation, it rarely remains “just software.” It becomes part of the environment through which people understand their work and act upon it.
Humans have always changed the world around them.
The difference today is the speed at which the things we build can begin changing us back.
Research behind this article
The quantitative opening is based on Elhacham, Ben-Uri, Grozovski, Bar-On and Milo, “Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass,” Nature 588 (2020). Nature — Global human-made mass exceeds all living biomass
For human niche construction and the feedback between human behaviour, culture and environment, see Kendal, Tehrani and Odling-Smee, “Human niche construction in interdisciplinary focus”, and the broader niche-construction literature discussed there. Human niche construction in interdisciplinary focus
For cognition distributed across people and artefacts, see Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, MIT Press. MIT Press — Cognition in the Wild
For the influential philosophical formulation of external cognitive resources, see Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58(1), 1998. Oxford Academic — The Extended Mind
For the experimental work on Internet access and memory, see Sparrow, Liu and Wegner, “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips,” Science 333, 2011. PubMed — Google Effects on Memory
For a cautious review of evidence concerning smartphones and cognition, see Wilmer, Sherman and Chein, “Smartphones and Cognition,” Frontiers in Psychology 8, 2017. Frontiers — Smartphones and Cognition
For the broader reciprocal relationship between human cognition and tool development, see Osiurak and colleagues, “How Our Cognition Shapes and Is Shaped by Technology,” Frontiers in Psychology, 2018. How Our Cognition Shapes and Is Shaped by Technology