Your Brain Is a Muscle, and It's Rapidly Atrophying
AI and the fear of friction is making us stupid. Plus: more links.
Writing is hard. When I do it, it often causes me pain. No matter how much I try to just sit down and get the words out, I must first battle myself—parts of my brain engaged in combat with each other over which word comes next, over what to withhold from the page. This will sometimes cause me to jump up from my desk like I’ve been shocked, and then pace around, and then eat a pretzel or five to calm down.
Which is to say: writing is an inherently frictive process. Your neurons bump into each other and fire in new directions, and this is how, after thousands of years of human history, something new can still be created in each sentence. Friction is good. It is generative.
Really, everything good requires friction. When people attempt to remove friction, it makes things bad.
The drive toward frictionless cooking in post-WWII America may have led to easier workloads for people, but it also produced unspeakable evils and helped erase the cultural and culinary memory Americans carried, thus hobbling the development of innovative, healthy cuisine for generations to come.
Friction makes life worth living.
Horniness, for example, is the friction of wanting something but not yet being able to achieve it. Why do you think “makeup sex” is so good? It’s because the more friction there is, the better the release is! Getting swole? The friction of your muscles literally tearing as you push them beyond their limits.
Today, our world seems intent on removing friction wherever possible. DoorDash makes the process of getting food frictionless (really, it just places the friction onto someone else, your delivery driver), Uber removes any possible friction (see: encountering other people) from your commute, internet therapy-speak encourages you to remove any and all friction from your personal life, even if that means being totally alone. And, of course, generative AI removes the entire process of frictive creation from your brain, outsourcing it to computers so that, yes, writing is easier, but easier in the sense that canned tuna on a frozen waffle is easier than cassoulet.
Much like purposefully causing microtears in our muscles helps them become stronger, purposefully allowing your neurons to crash into each other and battle it out until new thoughts are produced makes you smarter. And much like not moving your muscles atrophies them, so too does outsourcing thinking to a machine.
ChatGPT is the vibrating belt weight loss machine of the modern era—convincing people they are doing something useful for themselves by using it, while actually just wiggling them around until they become flabby and stupid.
