Republished from Vernacular Nicely Said #53
Hello, dear readers and those who have opted out of mental effort.
I’m a sucker for advice on longevity. Rapamycin, anyone? Zone 2 exercise for mitochondrial biogenesis. Sleep and intermittent fasting are also hot right now. And grip strength, too, which is regarded as a reliable predictor of all-cause mortality. Go figure.
Another piece of advice I heard was from a doctor who treated older patients. She said the one thing her oldest living patients had avoided throughout their long lives was comfort. They chose to do hard things. They exercised, no doubt, but they were also tough on themselves in other ways, such as forsaking the warm clutches of air-conditioned living for hot and cold extremes.
Many had a work history of manual labour and of occasionally going hungry. Who knows, perhaps what sounds like a hard-scrabble existence wasn’t a choice – it was simply the way they lived. Either way, it made them healthier in the long run.
AI arrives at a time when human beings have never been so soft around the edges. Apparently, the average American adult is now fatter than the average American pig. That grim comparison is possibly more pronounced in New Zealand, as the third-most obese nation in the OECD. Our pigs are regarded as leaner than their overseas counterparts, with baconer pigs specifically noted as “leaner than porkers.” So, there – even our pigs can trot about the place feeling haughty.
Our bodies are the product of modern-day comfort. Now our brains are under siege, because it’s never been easier to opt out of mental effort – to relinquish cognitive control and adopt AI’s reasoning as our own.
All this comes at a time when our cognitive powers are on the wane. An OECD survey of 160,000 adults aged 16–65 across 31 countries, published in December 2024, found that adult literacy skills declined in 19 OECD countries between 2012 and 2023. Only three countries including Denmark, Finland, and Sweden showed increases.
New Zealand’s scores lag those of league-table leader, Finland. They were also lower than the previous round of tests, with a 21-point drop in literacy and a 15-point drop in numeracy. We were already getting dumber. Now it looks like we’re dumb and dumber.
Mounting any sort of resistance is a bit like trying to shoo away the fat, suckable straw poking up from the frothy head of an ice-cold strawberry milkshake in a heat wave. Not possible. Especially when you put a question to your favourite LLM and it whistles up an answer in seconds and then asks if you’d like the whole bloody thing taken care of. Who’s going to turn that down? No one.
AI is like fast food, only the outlet is always within arm’s reach, gagging and slobbering to do our cognitive hard work. Soon we’ll have the grey matter to match our marbled organs. But think of the time AI frees up to do higher order work. Really? More like robbing us of the will to do critical thinking at all.
Better nutrition (starting with a bit less in the cake hole) will reverse the rate of obesity. Perhaps it’s time we started to ration AI, for our thinking’s sake.
Keep reading, magnificent humans.