Deskilling the body

A woman in her late 40s finds herself waking up at around four in the morning, as the early sunlight meets the night and slides across the earth like a red tide. As she scrolls through her phone, her stress levels start to rise, and she reflects on how her professional life has changed with the rise of smartphones and video calls.

Gone are the days of handwriting her writing and finding concentration for hours. Now, she relies on caffeine, sugary or salty snacks, and checking her emails to stay productive. This lifestyle has kept her tethered to her seat, leaving little time for physical activities like running or hiking outside. The writer notes that this is not an isolated case, as many people have fallen into habits that deskill the human body, weakening capacities honed by evolution to support their wellbeing.

These capacities, such as sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, and attending, are being replaced by reliance on technology and AI. The writer warns that our bodies are becoming less capable of assessing, improvising, and regulating themselves. Rather than viewing machines as tools that enhance our abilities, we have become convinced that we are machines ourselves, and sought to upgrade or even replace our bodies.

Through the lens of machine metaphors, we have lost sight of the importance of physical work, including the neurocognitive work of our biological brains, in shaping who we are. This is a particularly dangerous turn for an animal whose success has come from the extraordinary ability to learn through experience. The fear of a bodiless life is echoed in the technological quest for a mind uploaded to a computer, treating the body as mere hardware.