We are witnessing the birth of a Biological Underclass.

[Rupert]

I went to Gemini with an idea. It was a verbal diarrhoea. I called it that. I put food, social media, physical effort, and cognitive effort (simple reading) together, mentioned a few names, and asked Gem to put it together for me.  It came up with a proposal of biological divergence (that's new, the pilots and passengers bit)...

Thoughts?  I think is an interesting idea.  A bit "hard" but I feel I can almost see parts of it happening. What it means I dont know: 

It sounds like you're describing a "Biological Divergence." If the first pillar was cognitive (the brain), the second is metabolic (the body). When you combine the two, you aren't just looking at a change in social class; you're looking at a split in the human experience itself.

Expanding your theory into those three specific "frontiers"—AI, Reading, and the Body (UPF/Exercise)—here is how that looks when we tie it all together.
The Divergence Theory: The Three Frontiers

We are moving toward a "Two-Speed Society." This isn't about how much money you have in the bank, but the quality of your inputs—be they digital, intellectual, or nutritional.
1. The Cognitive Frontier (Reading & AI)

As you noted, reading is the "gym" for the brain. It builds the prefrontal cortex and allows for long-term planning.

    The Split: A small minority will continue to read, retaining the "Pilot" ability to command AI.

    The Consequence: The majority will succumb to "Digital Dementia," where the inability to focus makes them purely reactive, easily manipulated by algorithms and "doom-scrolling."

2. The Metabolic Frontier (UPFs & "Non-Food")

This is where Thomasina Miers and the conversation around Ultra-Processed Foods (UPFs) come in. As she often argues, UPFs aren't just "bad food"—they are industrially produced substances that bypass our satiety signals.

    The "Slow-Down": Those reliant on UPFs aren't just gaining weight; they are experiencing systemic inflammation that fogs the brain.

    The Feedback Loop: If you eat "non-food," your energy levels crash. When your energy crashes, you don't exercise. When you don't exercise, you seek the low-effort hit of a screen. It's a self-reinforcing cycle of physical and mental decline.

3. The Social Frontier (The Great Isolation)

The final result is a loss of Social Capital.

    The Active Tier: Those who eat well and exercise have the hormonal balance and energy to socialize in the real world, build communities, and maintain complex relationships.

    The Passive Tier: The combination of poor gut health (from UPFs) and screen addiction leads to social withdrawal. You lose the "muscle" of face-to-face interaction, becoming more isolated and easier to control.

Links & Sources for Your Research

To flesh out the "Eating & Exercise" pillar of your theory, these UK-centric resources and experts are the ones to watch:

    Thomasina Miers & UPF: You can find her columns in The Guardian where she discusses the "industrialisation of our diet." She often references the work of Dr. Chris van Tulleken, whose book Ultra-Processed People is the definitive text on why UPF isn't actually food. The Guardian - Thomasina Miers.

    Zoe Health Study: Based here in the UK, this is the largest study of its kind looking at how food affects individuals differently. Their podcast is a goldmine for the link between gut health and brain function. Zoe Science & Nutrition.

    The Food Foundation: A UK charity that tracks the "broken food system" and how the price of healthy food vs. UPFs is creating a massive health divide. Food Foundation UK.

    The Sedentary Behaviour Research Network: For studies on how screen time and physical inactivity directly correlate with a drop in cognitive performance and "social thinning."

    The "Verbal Diarrhea" Summary: > We are witnessing the birth of a Biological Underclass. On one side, you have people who are physically fit, gut-healthy, and "literate" (the Pilots). On the other, you have a population that is physically inflamed by UPFs, cognitively blunted by screens, and managed by AI (the Passengers).

[ergophobe]

Very US perspective here.

Frankly, it sounds a lot like what I see from the health and fitness grifters with millions of followers and lots of sciencey sounding claims peppered with a lot of buzzwords, fear and triggers to get people to click.

I come back to Ted Chiang's comment that "Fear of technology is actually fear of capitalism."

In other words, Gem is describing second-order consequences of the growing wealth disparities. I would even go so far as to say that this is essentially propaganda from the wealthy side of the equation that looks at each of the three frontiers as, to some degree, a division by virtue.

Good people eat right, continue to read and exercise.

If you look at youth sports in America, though, participation now is overwhelmingly among the wealthy. It's not because poor people hate exercise, it's because youth sports have become stupidly expensive and that is by design. And it is driven by wealthy parents looking for an edge and for validation. And those patterns carry over in later life.

If you look at youth nutrition, again, this divides by wealth and, again there are very good economic reasons for this. And again, this sets patterns for life.

If you look at reading, that's a bit tougher. The wealthy are much much more likely to send their kids to schools where all sorts of devices are banned, but once those kids get into those competitive colleges, they are all heading straight to their favorite chatbot for help. That said, I don't think the people who are shelling out actual money (the wealthy actually pay the price tag tuition; most people don't), they will demand actual education for that money and elite universities will adapt faster than others.

In short, I think what you are describing are symptoms of wealth inequality dressed up to make wealthy people feel really good about all the virtuous choices they are making and, more importantly, letting them feel justified in living different lives than those who make "bad" choices.

[Rupert]

OK that's interesting, as it is very much split by wealth. The sport split is not so prevelant over here yet thank goodness, or though there are sports that are wealth based.... sailing, Lacrosse, tennis is perhaps in the middle but many are not.

But that doesn't necessarily change what is happening and doesn't change the fact that the class divide is only being made wider by this.

It doesn't seem that long ago that "the poor" would be studying at night and learning how to read to lift themselves out of poverty, and in mine and Sue's families, that certainly happened. And it can still happen now.

Perhaps I should follow more health and fitness grifters I guess that's where Gemini got those ideas.

I don't read it as bad choices. As how can somebody make a choice when they don't know what the choices are and the consequences of the decisions that they apparently make? And I do see it as part of society's job to give everybody the opportunity to make those "good" choices.

I am certainly starting to go to my chatbot for answers. Apparently, we are all lazy as humans, and that is a part of the problem. I generally find chatbots too wordy, and I am rarely sure where the results come from... this being the example that stood out.

not to self, ask for shorter answers.  I am way behind!

[rcjordan]

In the US, serious youth baseball players (looking for scouts and/or scholarships) join 'travel ball' teams that are separate from their school teams.  My grandson was in that for 4-5 years. Besides the cost of equipment, fees, etc. the big cost is travel, hotels, & meals for the accompanying family members.  Overall, the costs run $10k^ish per season.

Now, his younger sister just started travel ball. In the first season or two, they travel closer to home so it will be some cheaper.

>scholarships

Don't get me started on this. Just put the same amount of money in the kid's college fund!!

[buckworks]

>> Overall, the costs run $10kish per season.

At one point we had three sons playing league hockey. That number is all too true!

[ergophobe]

I feel like this is particularly relevant in light of the recent attacks on Sam Altman, which recalls the Luddite attacks of the early 1800s

>> not to self, ask for shorter answers

Uh oh...

And I do see it as part of society's job to give everybody the opportunity to make those "good" choices.

Yes indeed. That was sort of the part that got me going. I think that, at least in the US, we are failing at that completely. I just don't understand why young people aren't rioting in the streets, voting my generation and older out of office, rolling back the entitlement state for wealthy old people (why does someone with millions of dollars in the bank and a healthy pension get Social Security?).

My point was that I think of the "biological divergence" and other things mentioned as consequences of long-term trends that are quite independent of and upstream of the three factors mentioned (AI dementia, poor diet, passivity/loss of social capital).

But that doesn't necessarily change what is happening and doesn't change the fact that the class divide is only being made wider by this.

Agreed. Those things are important, but to me they are important as symptoms, not causes. That's where I think the Gemini analysis goes off the rails. It gets the causal direction wrong.


Tech bros and meritocracy

This isn't about how much money you have in the bank, but the quality of your inputs

This is basically a "blame the victim" narrative that essentially pretends that those of us who are AI "pilots" and who go the "gym" of the mind, will (and should) rule the world.

The tech bro vibe is no surprise. An LLM is just a prediction machine. It is not going to offer new insight. It is ultimately going to offer the most probable take given the training data it has available.

So I think it has absorbed perspective from those who write (and thus provide training data). And that perspective is a defense of the current state of things, propped up by a misplaced belief that we live in some sort meritocracy where people have the nice things because they deserve them. As Will Munny says in Unforgiven, "Deserve's got nothing to do with it Little Bill."

The language of pilots vs passenger, active vs passive rings of the denigration of NPCs in tech bro speak while they, the technorati (aka pilots), sit astride the world making things happen and enjoying the just fruits of their superior decisions and intelligence.

I just don't buy it.

Biological Divergence

Biological divergence always accompanies great disparities in wealth.  It is as old as civilization. In fact, it almost defines the beginning of "civilization."

And, of course, the observation isn't new either. It is core to HG Wells' division of society into the Morlocks and the Eloi. There was a concern about the biological divergence then too as factory work and unhealthy conditions in cities and poor nutrition were stunting growth amount the working class in particular. Perhaps pollution too.

One measure of human flourishing is average height over time. Height among individuals has a genetic ceiling, but whether or not people reach their genetic ceiling is primarily a function of childhood nutrition. So when heights change within a population, that is mostly economics.

** The birth of agriculture/civilization.

When humans transitioned from hunter-gatherer cultures to agricultural cultures, average human height decreased by 2-4 inches and other health markers decreased based on skeletal remains. This is because those who *paid* tribute shrank dramatically, while those who *demanded* tribute grew rich and fat and presumably tall.

** The age of industrialization
Here again, the average British male shrank by about two inches during the period of rapid industrialization. This is a good analogy to the present - the Luddites begged Parliament to enforce the laws on the books and protect workers, but Parliament responded by repealing those laws and giving the burgeoning industrialists total free reign. So the Luddites attacked the factories.

Anyway, during this period, it's not just that British males got smaller on average, the gap increased between the size of males at the elite Sandhurst military academy and the lower class boys at the Marine Society.

Again, biological divergence driven precisely by the size of the bank account, not "the inputs."

** Portuguese in Switzerland

This is just anecdote. When I lived in Geneva, there were a lot of Portuguese immigrant families in my neighborhood and my building. It was striking to see that the parents, raised under the dictatorship, were almost all tiny manual laborers, and their children, raised in wealthy Switzerland, towered above them while going to university.

Here, the biological divergence righted itself in less than a generation. You could argue that "the inputs" changed, but I would argue that it was the bank account and, to your point about opportunities, moving from a society that didn't offer opportunities to one that did. But the main "opportunity" that Switzerland offered was very high wages even for immigrant labor.

In other words, I just don't buy the framing that the bank account doesn't matter.

Are people poor because they make bad decisions?

how can somebody make a choice when they don't know what the choices are

I think it is even a bit more fundamental than that.

This question has gotten a lot of research in the past couple decades.

One famous study concerns Indian farmers who get paid once a year at rice harvest. Researchers give them cognitive tests before harvest, when they are "poor," and after harvest, when they are "rich." There are large differences. They are "smarter" when they have a cushion. There is a big cognitive load to being poor.

Similarly, the famous marshmallow test has been looked at more carefully. In lore, the kids with better self control (who could wait), had better outcomes. But what this was actually testing and revealing was socio-economic background. It turns out that if you are a wealthy kid and someone tells you, "If you sit here until I come back, you will get two marshmallows," you can wait because:

1. You aren't that desperate for a marshmallow because you get treats often anyway
2. Adults commonly keep their promises to you and you believe that you actually will get a second marshmallow.

The poor kids, it turns out, don't believe either of those things so they make other choices.

Anyway, lots of research on this.

So I see almost all of the negative behaviors associated with the passenger/passive/NPC class as downstream of economic security and opportunity.

Participation in sports, eating habits, screen time for children and so on all track with income for very clear reasons.

Fixing the income/security problem is not magic. There are plenty of rich people who don't read and don't exercise too. But there would be a reversion to the mean.

learning how to read to lift themselves out of poverty,

I have mentioned this too many times, so the short version this time. The house my father bought for 2.5X salary as a first year teacher is now 13.5X salary for the same house for a teacher at the same school with the same job.

Why don't you start training right now to try to make the British team for the 400m and 800m in the next Olympics? Simple: because you have no chance of success. It would be wasted effort. If the odds seem impossible, none of us puts in the work unless we just have an absolute love of something.

My father was raised quite poor - 8 kids in a single-parent working-class household during the Depression. But he saw a path. He went in the army, then to college, got a job as a teacher and had a house, a car, a wife and two kids before he turned 27.

That trajectory is completely and utterly unattainable now except for members of the inheritocracy (thank you for that word).

So that once again  brings up your point about the duty of a society to provide opportunities. If the path out of the "biological underclass" seemed attainable, I think you would see a lot more people burning the midnight oil to get there.

In other words, I don't think the poor have changed so much as poverty has changed. Modern poverty offers a lot of small luxuries (iPhones and Netflix) while depriving people of a path to obtain fundamentals (homes, retirement savings, emergency funds).

At least the US, we are failing the younger generation. And we are failing them with or without AI, with or without doomscrolling, with or without bad nutrition... though all of those things are leading them down bad roads.