I think I think… therefore…am I?
- Schalk Mouton
[Column] Late afternoon, July 2055. I am lazing on the beach, in the port city of Howick in KwaZulu-Natal, pondering eternity and existence.
The coastline moved here years ago, after the melting of the last piece of ice on the Antarctic continent – an event that the US president at the time said was “FAKE news, created by WEAK, EVIL people”.
The sun’s lazy blue hue breaks through the mirror shield, lying 20km above, protecting our vulnerable planet from burning-up further. The Howick falls plunge into the ocean below. We’ve been here for a week on a lovely coastal breakaway.
A trip to Howick is definitely worth it now that the ocean is only about 400km from Joburg and the real thing is so much better than the digital ocean back in Joburg. Here, you can actually smell the slightly acidic sea – not the synthetic salty version AI can’t quite seem to get right.
Life is great. Blissful. Lying on the beach, sipping cocktails all day long – even though the know-it-all AI butler refuses to serve me a mojito after sweeping my body with its (he/she/it? Who knows!) quantum powered body scanner, claiming that some compound in the mint leaves isn’t compatible with my skin tone.
Still, it’s good to have a break from everyday life, back in the city. Now, part of “The Village,” Joburg is run automatically, by software. Like the rest of the world, the suburb of Joburg is controlled by the thoughts and fetishes of the being previously known as Elon Musk who decided years ago to turn himself into the first transhuman. He no longer walks. His body is maintained by nanotech; his mind is uploaded into every system – banking, climate control, narrative shaping. He is hailed as a prophet, a tyrant, a joke, a god.
Secretly still infatuated by Trump, Musk (now known by the self-proclaimed title “BIG D@DDY!”) has a speech pattern that still echoes Trumpian confidence and divisiveness, but which is sharpened by algorithms that measure real-time population sentiment. He is populism perfected – emotionally manipulative, instantly adaptive and impossible to depose. He doesn’t win elections; he updates his firmware.
Made to move?
But all that can be forgotten, for the moment. Lying on the beach, with nothing else to preoccupy me, I think – “I could do this forever!”. But then, immediately, a conflicting thought enters what I believe is my mind. “But could I really?” Would I actually be happy, just reclining on the beach, sipping (bland) cocktails for the rest of my life – which, thanks to medical enhancements, will last another 300 years?
I close my eyes and automatically open my brain-infused internet browser – I’m quite old-school that way – and I search for conversations I had back in 2025 with some Wits professors. “Are we made to move? To think? To have purpose in life?”.
Back then, Professor Demitri Constantinou from the Department of Exercise Science and Sports Medicine predicted that, should I succumb to indolence, I would become an obese, diabetic, miserable blob with hypertension, Alzheimer’s and all kinds of other problems thrown into the mix.
“Our bodies are definitely designed to move. Just like a car, if we don’t move, our parts seize up,” he said. The benefits of physical exercise have been proven without a doubt. Back then, exercise was even used to help expedite recovery from surgery (remember when you actually had to go for surgery to get things like a heart transplant!). Various organisations, including the World Health Organization, used to have various programmes and initiatives to get people involved in physical exercise – but it was an uphill battle.
A colleague of Constantinou’s, Professor Philippe Gradidge agreed that physical exercise was not only useful to get people moving but that it also had a social dimension. “People connect socially through engagement in physical exercise,” he said. “Activities such as Parkrun and sports clubs are extremely valuable in building holistic wellbeing in people.”
The evolution of lazy
Kate Cockcroft, Professor of Psychology at Wits, said that humans are definitely designed to move and think. Our brain’s ability to adapt over millennia in response to changing environmental demands is what has led to our being the dominant species (before the rise of transhumans, that is). However, we have also evolved to be “lazy”.
“Our brain works to maximise efficiency and minimise effort or expenditure of resources [some say that’s lazy], so whenever it can find a way to avoid cognitive effort, it will. That’s why generative AI platforms like ChatGPT are so appealing and so widely used. So, whenever we can find ways of making our lives easier, we will,” said Cockcroft.
Comfortably bummed
Looking around at the individual semi-life forms lying around on the beach confirms Cockcroft’s (and Constantinou’s) assertions. We expended a lot of effort in the past in designing the world around us to make life easier, rendering us lazy. It is an irreversible spiral, where the more thinking and physical exercise we do, the more we want to do. While, on the other hand, the less you do, the less you want to do.
Back in 2025, Cockcroft believed that freeing up resources allowed us to engage in a range of other cognitive tasks, like creative endeavours and critical thinking. Like the Greeks and Romans of old, we might again come together and challenge each other in lively debate. But, even back in the day, there is no way that I would have wanted to see any of my colleagues dressed up in their bedsheets to attend a debate at work – 100% Egyptian cotton from Woolies or not!
But for now, daydreaming, I sip a cocktail while in the background the latest bland AI generated hit is playing softly.
I am bored to death. For eternity.
- Schalk Mouton is a freelance writer.
- This article first appeared in Curiosity, a research magazine produced by Wits Communications and the Research Office.
- Read more in the 19th issue, themed #Disruption, which explores the crises, tech, research, and people shaking up our world in 2025.