The Humanness Gym

Do we need places where we strengthen and build our unique human traits?

We have had an explosion in fitness because there's been a recognition that fitness is a beneficial act that improves your health.

Many of us now go out of our way to ensure we count our steps, eat the right foods, and work out. It's because fitness is something many feel they must do in order to be healthy.

Now let's think about the challenges we face from AI.

It's changing the way we think, the way we write, read, work, and it's suppressing and atrophying many of the things that make us human.

And this is pervasive-especially amongst certain cohorts.

Open-AI's Sam Altman suggested just the other day; ChatGPT is being used by younger generations to help make life decisions.

Using the fitness analogy—our humanness is in decline.

Or perhaps, put in a more extreme way, under attack.

Like with our physical fitness, we are going to be forced to take action to arrest the decline.

The willingness to take the slower, more human route to thinking, writing, reading and idea development—and to resist the convenience and ease of using AI to perform tasks for us—will take tremendous willpower, just like achieving fitness.

To protect and enhance our humanness, we will need Humanness Gyms.

Places where we get to work out and strengthen our humanness?

Places devoid of any form of computers.

Places where the use of smartphones is prohibited.

Places full of physical books.

Places designed for art, play, and conversation.

Places where we can work on the things that make us oh so very different from the machines.

Humanness Gyms will be in our workplaces and our main streets.

They will be formed by the coming together/alliance of independent bookstores, educators, artists, and community leaders- unlike Starbucks, they will become genuine third places that are purposefully designed to enhance humanness.