The early evidence isn’t good, but I do believe with deliberate and thoughtful training our brains our capable of much more than we currently give them credit for.
Obesity is actually decreasing today, due to GLP-1 receptor agonists. We are already over peak obesity.
Hug me till you drug me, honey;
Kiss me till I'm in a coma;
Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny,
Love's as good as soma."
I'm sorry, what? Heavy assistance? The overwhelming majority of people are completely capable of walking on their own two feet. The number of people relying on "heavy assistance" for "basic locomotion" is overwhelmingly tiny, and primarily limited to the elderly
We should strive for a society where day-to-day life makes a baseline mental fitness a natural outcome as well.
I imagine the answer looks something like Wordle writ large: Replacing passive time consumption activities with interactive ones that are as readily accessible (“walkable”).
There’s a fun scene in Star Trek: The Next Generation where LeVar Burton’s chief engineer character is on a long shuttle ride by himself. In addition to sipping a synthehol cocktail, he asks the computer to play a verbal game. It chooses to give him a quiz in his domain of warp field mechanics, and because it’s a smart AI, it calibrates the questions to be just at the limits of his knowledge.
We’ll need to build a nose for the right kind of information. Kids growing up in this world already are better at it than older folks who are newly thrown into this environment.
But beyond that I think our agency has already been sapped, as a species. Rebuilding the muscle to exercise our agency as free citizens using the information at our command to make better decisions… we shouldn’t surrender this ability to AI. The best science fiction and science writing already gives us plenty of reason to avoid this. We don’t need to get to the worst of it, and have all out war to correct it.
And that does mean investing heavily in human education. Getting better at teaching things to adults. Making insight easier to gain at every strata of society so true freedom of information when it comes to public works and governance is achieved, which makes the people the watchers and owners of government.
No easy thing to do. Absolutely doable, technologically speaking and in terms of our current biology.
What we have is years of thinking we’re not capable enough. Or cooperative enough. Or rational enough. We can be. We just need the right context, a full belly, and practice in using our voices and shaping our futures actively.