BAKU, Azerbaijan, October 14. Excessive use of social media and automated systems can lead to a decline in human cognitive abilities and create opportunities to manipulate users’ behavior for commercial and other purposes, Erol Gelenbe, an IEEE member and professor at the Institute of Theoretical and Applied Informatics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, said at the opening ceremony of the 20th International Conference on Application of Information and Communication Technologies (AICT2026) in Baku on Wednesday, Trend’s correspondent reports from the event.
“The results of the PISA assessment in secondary education have, for the first time, shown a significant decline in performance across most OECD countries. This is directly linked to the spread of social media: people spend time browsing information online instead of devoting sufficient time to learning and developing the ability to solve complex problems independently. Excessive dependence on automated systems also carries the risk of people losing their own capabilities. The danger is that we will increasingly lose our abilities if we rely on automated systems that tell us what to do. I consider this the main risk,” Gelenbe said.
He also drew attention to the possibility of manipulating users’ behavior through artificial intelligence systems. According to him, large software and hardware systems known as AI systems contain vast numbers of parameters whose modification can affect how they behave. When deliberately exploited, these mechanisms may cause systems to influence and manipulate people rather than help them.
“This has already happened over the past seven or eight years, when Facebook used established principles of cognitive science to adaptively modify users’ responses, particularly those of young people, to create addiction,” Gelenbe said.
He emphasized that the main risks stem both from the underdevelopment of human capabilities due to excessive dependence on technology and from the potential for companies and other actors to use digital systems to pursue their own economic, political, and other objectives.
The 20th International Conference on Application of Information and Communication Technologies (AICT2026) is being held at ADA University in Baku.
Azerbaijan is hosting the conference for the seventh time. This year’s event marks the 20th anniversary of the AICT conference series under the slogan “20 Years of Connecting Science, Technology, and Society.”
The event is jointly organized by ADA University, relevant IEEE units in Azerbaijan, Politecnico di Torino, George Washington University, Nazarbayev University, United Arab Emirates University, Tashkent University of Information Technologies, Kazakh-British Technical University, Tbilisi State University, Georgian Technical University, SDU University, the Nikola Tesla Institute of Electrical Engineering, and the Alessandro Faedo Institute of Information Science and Technologies.
The conference aims to facilitate knowledge exchange in information and communication technologies and discuss the sector’s latest developments. It brings together researchers, academics, and industry representatives.
