From “The Triumph of the Gadget” (1939) by Albert Jay Nock:

During the last fifty years there has been invented almost every conceivable labor-saving device, with the consequence that the average man is in a state of utter manual incompetence. This is well-known and is often commented upon. But what is not so often observed is that these gadgets are not only labor-saving but brain-saving, thought-saving; and it seems an inescapable conclusion that a correlative mental incompetence is being induced.

A certain amount of resistance seems necessary for the proper functioning of mental and moral attributes, as it is for that of physical attributes. In any of these three departments of life, if you can get results without effort, and habitually do so, the capacity for making the effort dwindles. Whatever takes away the opportunity for effort, whatever obviates or reduces the need for making it, is therefore to some degree deleterious. It needs a bit of brains to manage a furnace-fire successfully; an automatic heater needs none; hence many householders today could not manage a furnace-fire to save their lives. It needs some brainwork to add up a column of figures; running an adding-machine needs nothing but attention; consequently there are many book-keepers and bank-clerks now who not only do not add but cannot. As we all have frequently had occasion to observe, shopkeeping now seldom requires any more strenuous mental exercise than is involved in consulting a price-list. Cooking is a great art, requiring a lot of brain-work; running the modern kitchen requires far less.

Animals having organs which, on account of changes in their environment, they no longer use, turn into a species which has only vestigial remnants or rudimentary forms of these organs, sometimes amounting to no more than mere vague suggestions, like the os coccygis in human beings, which vaguely suggests a remote ancestral tail. There is much in “the course of modern civilization” which strongly intimates that this may be happening to the mental and moral powers of Western man. The trouble with arm-chair-and-push-button Utopias like the one so attractively sketched for us by H. G. Wells, is that they carry brain-saving to the point of complete disuse. Even at present, judging by what one sees, hears, and reads, great numbers of Americans seem pretty well to have reached that point already.

Americans are the world’s foremost gadget-users, and unquestionably the leisure gained in this way is used chiefly for further brain-saving – a substitution of play-gadgets for work-gadgets; motion-pictures, automobiles, radio-music, as an alternative to adding-machines, price-lists, fireless cookers. One could make out a very reasonable case for the statement that Americans at large have given up using their brains for purposes of thought, and use them only for purposes of attention and contemplation. If this be so, then with the field of gadgetry steadily enlarging and brain-power proportionately dwindling, one might plausibly forecast a generation of American children born without any brains at all, but only with vestigial faculties of attention and contemplation, no more highly differentiated – perhaps even less highly – than those which are common to extremely low forms of animal life.

See Things as They Are by Alert Jay Nock at IWP Books