The Age of Stupidity: The Inevitability of AI's Intellectual Challenge Avoidance
The Age of Stupidity: The Inevitability of AI's Intellectual Challenge Avoidance
From the moment you are born you face challenges. Pressure, sensory overload, struggle for your first breath. These early challenges support neurophysiological development and sensory adaptation to the external world.
We enter the world through a cacophony of challenge and continuously, throughout the rest of our lives, encounter challenges of all sorts which form our every waking hour. Challenge develops every strength. Some would say, “life is hard.” And our bodies adapt.
Not so long ago, cosmically speaking, humans had to work very hard just to survive. Hunting and gathering food and water, building shelter, fire, facing countless risks and trials along the way. Humans ran, lifted, pushed, worked, farmed, strained, suffered and fought our way to scratch out the basics of survival. Throughout history humanity endured physical and mental labor to simply live each day.
Among Earth’s creatures, human beings are not particularly special. Other animals have stronger hands. Faster legs. The ability to hold their breath and go without food and water much longer than us. Physically speaking we are pretty middling. Relatively weak even. But we have a power; our sole evolutionary trick, the one and only attribute that has enabled our relative prosperity and survival: we can think better.
Humans are tool makers. We discovered that we could ease our burden here and there with the concentrated force of an axe, an arrow, shoes, a wheel. We still worked hard. But found we could do more faster and better, with a degree less discomfort. Wherever our greatest pain points were, eventually, human ingenuity would develop a solution.
This process of identifying a pain point and solving it with an innovation is as core a human attribute as there is. Bit by bit, invention by invention, humanity addressed and removed our greatest challenges and discomforts. To the extent that among other things we removed ourselves from the food chain.
At some point, and to be honest I'm not sure it received the attention it merited, the developed world’s drive to reduce our physical challenges passed a key threshold. I'm sure some old codger marked the event by loudly griping, "Today's generation doesn't even know what hard work is!"
Though as a moment in our vague continuum of progress I'm quite confident that A) every previous generation's old codgers griped about the younger generation inheriting the relative ease of progress, and B) I'm pretty sure we weren't watching for this particular milestone. But at some point, with agriculture, industry, markets and, well, cars (I think the proliferation of cars was probably the tipping point), progressive society rode over the hump of physical challenge in service to survival. In other words, the expenditure of physical effort, and suffering to make do without, which had for all time been built into the very process of living, on that day inverted. Food, water, shelter and safety became so easy to acquire that the body was not naturally challenged in kind, either through physical activity or through withholding.
The result of this access to abundance and the systemic reduction in physical challenge over the last 100 years is that we experienced a boom in obesity. With the lack of built in physical challenges and limitations, our bodies changed. Countless diseases stemming from overindulgence and a relatively sedentary lifestyle took a toll.
In response, what did we do?
We invented the rather peculiar ideas to diet and exercise!
We realized that to be healthy, we had to introduce some kind of physical challenge to our bodies, like, on purpose; imagine that. Apparently, we discovered, the human body thrives when physically challenged. So we created a kind of abstract physical activity that resulted in no productive output whatsoever; running that takes you nowhere, lifting heavy things without relocating them usefully. Hard labor without material progress. This otherwise purposeless physical challenge comes close to approximating some of the effort we might have expended simply hunting and gathering our food and securing shelter, but accomplishes none of those things. Ironically, this activity is performed on a schedule that fits between car rides to the market and the home improvement store.
When you think about it, it's a slightly weird system we have created.
The New Age of Stupidity
Today we face a whole new domain of challenge avoidance. No longer relegated to merely avoiding physical challenge, today we are about to cross the rubicon into widespread intellectual challenge avoidance.
We are, eagerly it seems, systematically removing life’s built in requirements to think. And this doesn’t mean we are just removing one type of intellectual effort, advanced mathematics say, we are removing the need to think at large. To problem solve, to strategize, to learn, to imagine, to dream, all about to be dutifully replaced by a gradient of increasingly radical improvements to AI. I do not know quite where the threshold is, the hump beyond which our brains are no longer naturally or sufficiently challenged by encountering life’s built-in intellectual problems to stay healthy. But I know that we will. And because we will experience passing this threshold as a kind of relief, we will slide past it without screaming to defend the innate intelligence of our species.
We let slide life’s innate physicality in favor of convenience and proceeded to get fat, weak, and unhealthy. And now we are about to do the very same thing with our minds.
Jesus, people. See this.
What’s worse, this is happening much faster than its physical counterpart did thanks to the exponential acceleration of processing power.
No previous technology will have had as big an impact on human beings as AI.
The human species is on the cusp of devolving itself, regressing into organic stupidity. This will begin to happen about as fast as your muscles take to atrophy through disuse. This will happen during your lifetime, whoever you are, no matter how old you may be. It has already begun to show itself, as purported creators of content use AI to write and thus lack the knowledge of the content they share. “Vibe coders” who have no understanding of the solutions they “created”, employees who can’t pick up a phone and argue the same case their AI so eloquently articulated in email. This is just the start. Senility, dementia and Alzheimer’s will skyrocket. IQ and other measures of intelligence and intellectual ability will inevitably drop.
And you know what will have to happen, don’t you? Right, we will have to invent the idea to exercise again, but for our atrophying, cellulite-sogged minds this time.
I can’t imagine that an abstract, unproductive intellectual exercise will quite reach the sustaining impact that comes from the constant, urgent stimulation of natural survival and productivity that we evolved for. And anyway, most of us, facing such an artificial challenge as an option, but not a requirement for life, will probably choose not to be bothered. Just as most of us do with physical fitness. Sadly, thinking harder will probably become the domain of New Year’s resolutions and spam pitches.
For the time being we are still on the “thinking for survival” side of the hump. Most of us have to strategize, write, problem solve, innovate and generally challenge our minds to make a living. But AI is about to remove that requirement once and for all and push us rapidly over the hump.
So I’d say “invest in mind gyms” but honestly, I don’t have a lot of faith that humanity will care enough to sign up. Thinking is too hard for most of us. Don’t believe me? Just spend some time in social media comment threads.
