Madden Mischief

First and foremost, upon revisiting earth starting in 2057, I expect you’ll be seeing people with noticeably smaller heads along with other parts of their bodies, not just shrunken but altogether missing.  Smaller heads might even give a new name to some headwear—hatrophy.

This is because just as AI is reducing the need for workers in offices and factories, our brains in the future won’t need as many cells to process information, so the office space for those brain cells, our heads, can be much smaller.  Also, with growing dependence on AI to outsource tasks, some are seeing the onset of intellectual atrophy and are fearful that in the age of AI critical thinking could decline.

Also, it’s possible we’ll all become a foot or two shorter.

This is because physically going somewhere won’t be as necessary as it is today with technology able to find and rapidly deliver whatever we need, so calf muscles and other parts of our legs could certainly diminish in utility and therefore size.

If you don’t use, you lose!

Besides smaller heads and shorter legs, humans will probably undergo other dramatic changes, most noticeably, smaller faces!

With the latest advances in hearing aid technology, whereupon a tiny button, one-sixteenth the size of an eraser on a pencil, can hear a whisper distinctly clear from a hundred yards away, so the current shape and size of ears will become way out of proportion to what’s needed to hear. 

So, when we don’t use it, what do we say?  We lose it!   

And we won’t need ears to hold and steady sunglasses either.  To shield our eyes from sunlight, optometrists and ophthalmologists will have developed miniscule shades to install directly into our eyes along with the 20/20 vision already installed thereby making ears superfluous.   

Also, ancient activities such as house cleaning and gardening, mowing lawns and shoveling snow will all now be more swiftly and intelligently handled by robots further diminishing what used to provide humans with a prehistoric form of exercise that produced what were called muscles.

We’ll also clearly see the impact AI will have on language too and what used to be called what humanly me still does a lot of–writing.

You’ll never hear such expressions as “lend an ear” as fewer will even know what an ear is or was.   But you’ll hear new ones like “you sure huanged it,” should you invent something as revolutionary as was Jensen Huang’s Nvidia chips, which in 2025 started the “AI bubble.” 

A communications cave in

Communications via emails or letters, if there’s still paper, also will be shorter, more succinct, with fewer syllables and more hyperlinking to save what will become even more precious, time and space.  Condensed writing will appear above what will be the predominant valediction or closing, “artificially yours.”

Also different will be the wardrobe worn by a species called “swives,” who once had to turn their backs to “fuzzbands” asking them to pull up a zipper behind them they couldn’t reach. 

Researchers have discovered a phenomenon called model collapse—when AI models train on AI-generated content, they gradually “mis-perceive reality” and lose nuances that make human intelligence humanly valuable. Their Nature study* found models that train on recursively generated data forget the true underlying distribution of real-world information. Over time, performance degrades in ways that are nearly impossible to detect until damage that occurs becomes significant.

Oh, how wonderful.  I could go on, but it’s depressing to think how technology will be replacing so many human parts, and heaven help us, maybe even robotically replacing humanity itself, ending what were once called “feelings” and “empathy” for other humans and the strangest sensation of all, “love.” 

Our Defense

Thankfully, we all have humanity’s best defense against any artificial intelligence caused mayhem as I’m describing.  It’s that something armor plated with gold that will always keep humans shining brightly, no matter what awesome new efficiencies high tech may starkly or darkly deliver.  It’s our sense of humor emitting something that will forever keep us human, laughter!

Oh well, I think I’ll go relax and listen to some music while I still have ears and that wonderful sense of humor.  

I truly hope this gave you a laugh or two.  If not, I’ll have to insert a chuckle chip.

Tom Madden is a real, not artificial author of countless articles, books and press releases.  He’s the CEO of TransMedia Group and ever trying his best to keep up with technological advances in his field of public relations, which today thanks to tech has many more ways to send messages, spread stories and disseminate his satiric blogs from www.maddenmischief.com that he’s hopeful you’ll find mischievously funny.