The Theory of Environmental Resistance: AI and the Age of Cognitive Weightlessness

Foto: AP Photo/Richard Vogel

Frictionless Code and the Uncanny Valley of Meaning

Just the other day, the ChatGPT mobile app officially surpassed the 1 billion monthly active users mark. Let that number sink in. Right now, one in eight people on the planet is typing prompts into a text box, entrusting their decisions, texts, code, and thoughts to an algorithm. Hundreds of millions more are using Gemini, Claude, and Meta AI. We have officially awakened to a world where artificial intelligence has become the primary generator of meaning on Earth.

I felt the scale of this firsthand when I recently caught an AI in a blatant technical lie. I asked a simple question about banking gateways, and the bot, with the face of a professor, spouted a load of nonsense, smoothly weaving together made-up facts. When I called it out, it apologized and told the truth.

And that’s when I got really creeped out.

Social media feeds and specialized media outlets are flooded with articles on this topic. Every other tech blogger has already written about the “collapse of models,” about how the internet is turning into a dumpster of copy-pasted garbage, and how people are getting dumber and spewing more nonsense. Sorry, but I can’t stand reading these clichés anymore. All these authors are theorists who view the problem through their laptop screens. They see the tip of the iceberg but don’t understand the actual physics of the process.

I decided to dig deeper and write this piece from a completely different angle - from the vantage point of my own personal, tangible, physical experience.

My interaction with reality didn’t begin with prompts, but with an old Soviet metal construction set at age three, where a nut that was tightened incorrectly would jam the gear’s movement. Over the next thirty-plus years, this experience grew exponentially more complex: from hundreds of hours at the classical piano and guitar, where a single off-key note grates on the ear, and thousands of lines of poetry written according to strict classical canons - to 25 years in dance and acrobatics, where a split-second miscalculation of the center of mass during a somersault guarantees a face-first meeting with concrete. Today, I professionally manage the most complex technology of optical and inertial motion capture. My workday involves calibrating Xsens suits, where if a sensor shifts by a millimeter, the 3D character on screen instantly dislocates its joints and falls through the floor texture.

My entire background - from acrobatics, origami, and photography to neuroscience, urban studies, and anthropology - shouts one thing: true intelligence and true truth are born only through overcoming the resistance of the environment. The physical world is honest. It has gravity, density, anatomy, and conservation laws. In it, you cannot hallucinate a jump or fake the tension of a string.

AI is fundamentally different. It has no body; it has never fallen, never felt weight or fatigue. It doesn’t seek the truth; it simply engages in mathematical smoothing - constructing perfect, smooth splines between words from the internet, filling the void with random probabilities.

A billion people today voluntarily jump into this warm, slippery bath of “frictionless intelligence.” They look at the beautiful final render that the bot spits out and swallow it whole. But if you have calluses on your fingers and experience working with real material, you instantly see the “uncanny valley of logic” in the AI’s answers: its skeleton is turned inside out, and the facts hang in the air.

Below, I’ll break down why the problem of AI hallucinations isn’t a developer screw-up, but the beginning of the harshest division of the world into two castes in human history. And I’ll explain why your childhood metal construction set is more important today than the ability to write prompts.

The Ontology of Friction: Why Truth Has Weight

Gravitational integrity and the geometry of the limit.

True intelligence does not arise in a vacuum. It has always been, and remains, a product of the constraints of the material world - a harsh response to the immutability of physical laws. To understand why the modern belief in the infallibility of algorithms is a dangerous illusion, we must view the world through the lens of disciplines where deception is physically impossible.

Pick up a regular sheet of paper. To an outside observer, it is simply a two-dimensional plane, a blank canvas. But to an origami master, paper is a space with finite density, molecular tension, and its own stubborn “memory of the material.” The geometry of origami is absolute determinism. You cannot cheat. Every fold you make permanently alters the structure of the fibers. If a microscopic inaccuracy is made in the second step, the crane simply won’t fold in the tenth step. The thickness of the layers accumulates, creating a miniature but insurmountable resistance from the materials. To create a form, a person must engage in a dialogue with physical reality, taking its rigid limits into account.

Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, exists in a state of absolute ontological weightlessness. When a diffusion neural network generates an image of folded hands or intertwined objects, it does not understand what volume, tensile limit, or the impermeability of matter are. The algorithm simply bends the void. It shuffles pixels according to probabilistic patterns, ignoring the fact that in the real world, objects cannot occupy the same point in space without conflict. This is precisely why, in its flawlessly lit renders, fingers monstrously sprout through palms, and stair treads close into impossible Möbius strips. AI has no business with paper, skin, or bone. It operates on statistical noise, in which there is not a millimeter of real resistance, and thus - no true understanding of form.

This sterility of algorithmic thinking becomes even more evident when we turn to biomechanics. Look at a ballet dancer in a sustained leap or an acrobat performing a backflip. Their movements are not merely aesthetics; they are the triumph of the human body over the relentless vector of gravity. In the physical world, every such action is an extremely complex equation that the nervous system solves in tenths of a second. Inertia, muscle contraction, spatial orientation, and the search for the center of mass all come into play. And this equation has an absolute cost.

In acrobatics, you cannot rely on statistical probability of success or generate several landing options. If the calculation is incorrect, the body will collide violently with concrete or parquet. Pain, injury, and physical exhaustion are not system bugs, but fundamental markers of reality. It is precisely the fear of falling and the cost of error that shape true, living intelligence. The human brain learns to understand space and the logic of things through the harshest constraints and the irreversible consequences of its commands.

Neural networks, however, have never fallen. They do not know what it means to have palms torn to shreds or to be left breathless from a miscalculated effort. Because of this total impunity, the logical constructs of algorithms - whether program code, a philosophical essay, or a business strategy - often “hang in the air.” AI can produce perfectly structured, polished text, but upon closer inspection, a person with a trained eye immediately sees a shifted center of gravity. There is no ontological weight in the machine’s logic. It easily connects mutually exclusive facts because it feels no cognitive dissonance - for it, these facts have no mass.

This is frictionless intelligence, a simulacrum of creation. It is capable of charming only those ordinary people whose own bodies and minds have long delegated the struggle with reality to comfortable interfaces, forgetting that true truth always carries weight, and beauty is born only where there is a risk of shattering.

The Optics and Acoustics of Overcoming.

The illusion of digital omnipotence becomes even more unsettling when we move from the mechanics of physical bodies to the physics of light. A true photograph is not merely an image; it is an act of material confirmation of reality, an indelible physical imprint. For a photograph to be taken, a photon must travel from its source, reflect off the surface of a real object, pass through the lens, and leave an irreversible chemical or digital imprint on the sensor for a precisely defined fraction of a second. This process is a document of the era, a fixation of a moment that existed within the coordinates of space and time. Here, light acts as an absolute, incorruptible witness. It reveals the texture of skin, microscopic dust in the air, and the real geometry of shadows, which obeys the strict laws of optics.

Generative networks operate within a fundamentally different paradigm. The diffusion model does not capture light - it sculpts an illusion from primordial statistical noise, relying on weights and probabilities. In this synthetic world, there is no sun, no photons, and no reflective surfaces. It is a vacuum in which shadows can fall in different directions, and the glare in the pupils does not correspond to the geometry of the surrounding space, because the algorithm does not need a light source - it simply predicts which pixels should be darker. The average person, whose vision is clouded by endless scrolling, swallows this smooth, polished render whole. But anyone who understands the nature of light and works with real optics instantly spots the fakery. There is no documentary quality in the generated frame, because no event took place within it.

This same law of physical resistance of the medium also shapes acoustic integrity. Music is not a mathematical dictate of frequencies, but a tactile, bodily overcoming of matter. A piano or guitar requires the performer to physically extract sound, to make direct contact with the material. When a finger presses down on a key, it overcomes the inertia of a complex mechanism: the density of the wood, the resistance of the lever, the weight of the felt hammer striking the string. The tension of nylon or metal against the calluses on the fingertips creates microscopic delays, barely perceptible changes in tempo - that very rubato that makes the music breathe. It is precisely this physical effort, the friction of flesh against metal and wood, that causes the instrument’s body to resonate, generating a complex web of overtones and acoustic artifacts.

Algorithmic generation and the quantized MIDI grid mercilessly destroy this physicality. In a neural network composition, sound is not born of overcoming resistance - it simply emerges from the void as a perfect digital signal. The force of a strike on a string or key is reduced to a sterile velocity parameter, confined to values between 0 and 127. The algorithm places notes on a flawless temporal grid, eliminating those very micro-imperfections in which the human soul lies. The result is musical plastic. It can perfectly imitate harmony and genre clichés, but it is utterly devoid of tactility. There is no held breath before a complex chord, no trembling of the string from hand fatigue - no ontological friction without which sound remains merely a mathematical formula, incapable of piercing the listener’s neural armor.

The Architecture of the Spirit: Art as a Voluntary Cage

The canon as the Procrustean bed of genius.

Even when we leave the tangible world of flesh, light, and sound, entering the pure realm of abstract ideas, the law of resistance remains the immutable foundation of creation. True art has never been an unimpeded stream of consciousness pouring into the void. On the contrary, in its highest manifestations, it has always been a voluntary confinement within a cage. Consider the architecture of classical poetry: it is built not on freedom, but on the most severe self-restrictions. Rhyme, meter, the alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables, the strict mathematical grid of iambic or hexameter - these are the iron bars of the canon that the author consciously erects around his thought. The poet deliberately rejects the simplest way to express emotion in order to make it operate according to the laws of linguistic physics.

This is the true nature of genius: creativity is a process of extreme cognitive compression. The creator forces the infinite, chaotic expanse of human experience into the Procrustean bed of a rigid framework. Finding the one correct word that will not disrupt the rhythmic pattern, yet convey the full depth of pain or delight, is a colossal labor accompanied by the agony of choice and the sharpest intellectual friction. The author may struggle for hours over a single line, cutting away the superfluous, tailoring the form to the content. It is precisely this resistance of the linguistic material that creates immense internal tension within the text, a spring that the reader senses unconsciously. We feel the density of thought because we know: behind this lightness of sound lies a titanic effort to package meanings.

For a large language model, this Procrustean bed does not exist, because for it, the very concept of overcoming does not exist. A neural network generates poems and essays without the slightest internal conflict. For the algorithm, the rhythmic grid of a sonnet or the structure of an academic article is not a cage, but simply a set of probabilistic rules for rearranging tokens. The machine knows no agony of choice; it feels no frustration that the desired thought does not fit within the given size. It simply pours out statistically calibrated syntax that instantly fills any form without a single rough edge. Because exactly zero effort is expended on aligning form and content, a catastrophic inflation of meaning occurs. The algorithmic text turns out flawlessly smooth, but utterly hollow. It lacks “bated breath” and compressed energy, because words born without resistance or pain lose their value even before they are read.

The Metabolism of Deception:

The Neurobiology of the “Smooth World”

Cognitive Sugar and Hacking the Reward System.

This total sterility of algorithmic space does not merely create a distorted picture of the world for us - it deals a direct, measurable blow to the physiology of our brains. To understand the mechanism of this destruction, we must descend to the cellular level and acknowledge a harsh biological fact: thinking is a colossal waste of energy. The human brain, comprising a negligible fraction of body mass, burns the lion’s share of the glucose and ATP molecules produced by the body. Millions of years of evolution have instilled in us a fundamental survival instinct - to conserve this precious cellular resource at every opportunity. It is precisely this biological vulnerability that artificial intelligence flawlessly exploits, acting as the ideal “cognitive sugar.” It provides the brain with a neurochemical surrogate for understanding, completely relieving it of the metabolic costs of the actual process of cognition.

When a person faces a complex task, analyzes conflicting primary sources, or attempts to construct a new concept, they experience cognitive friction, which the nervous system perceives as stress. Overcoming this stress and finding an answer is rewarded with a powerful surge of dopamine - this is how nature reinforces beneficial behavior. Chatbots short-circuit this dopamine loop. By delivering a brilliantly structured, comprehensive answer in a fraction of a second, they trigger a rush of pleasure hormones, creating a lasting illusion of competence in the user. The brain celebrates a victory, receiving a reward for “understanding” the problem, when in reality it has done no work at all. This total capitulation to an easy result causes us to confuse the rapid consumption of generated information with genuine knowledge synthesis.

This chemical illusion is followed by inevitable structural degradation, known in neuroscience as synaptic pruning. Neuroplasticity - the brain’s ability to grow new connections—is activated exclusively when overcoming obstacles. The physical sprouting of dendrites and the strengthening of synapses occur only when a person struggles through misunderstanding, doubts, makes mistakes, and reassembles the logical chain. If, however, the resistance of the environment is eliminated by an algorithm, the brain initiates ruthless optimization. Under the “use it or lose it” principle, the neural circuits responsible for critical analysis, deep reading, and the ability to sustain attention on complex paradoxes are identified as energy-consuming dead weight and physically dismantled. Our cognitive apparatus adapts to a new, frictionless environment by shedding its most complex functions.

The diagnosis of this process sounds alarming: society is rapidly sinking into a state of mass intellectual atrophy and learned helplessness. We have forgotten how to endure the tension of not knowing. Confronting any problem requiring sustained concentration no longer evokes the excitement of a researcher, but rather panic and an immediate desire to delegate the analysis to a machine. The user ceases to be the architect of meaning, transforming into a passive relay of others’ algorithmic conclusions. And this disintegration occurs not because of a lack of information, but precisely because of its absolute, refined accessibility, which has deprived our minds of the gravity necessary for survival.

The Inertia of Large Systems: The Macro Level

The Topology of Compromise Versus Geometric Utopia.

What occurs at the micro level of an individual’s neural connections inevitably scales up, giving rise to the macro level of the simulacrum. When the illusion of frictionlessness breaks free from digital interfaces, artificial intelligence begins to claim control over vast human systems, whose nature has been forged over millennia of evolution, error, and the most brutal inertia. Our spaces and social institutions have never been the product of pure mathematical reason. They represent the most complex topology of compromise - the result of the endless clash between imperfect human biology and the harshness of the material world. But an algorithm, devoid of flesh and memory of physical struggle, perceives this organic complexity as a programming error requiring immediate optimization. It attempts to impose a sterile geometric utopia upon pulsating reality.

This conflict between synthetic calculation and living matter is most clearly evident in urbanism. No truly living city has ever developed according to the perfectly drawn templates of master plans. Urban space is shaped through a constant dialogue with the terrain, the economy, and the physiology of movement. The most striking marker of this process is the phenomenon of “desire paths” - those very spontaneous, muddy or snow-trodden trails that stubbornly cut across manicured lawns and break the right angles of paved walkways. These curved lines are laid down by living people, instinctively bypassing obstacles, sheltering from the wind, and conserving muscular energy. In the illogicality of this path lies a fundamental physical honesty: it is the material embodiment of how organic life resists an abstract order imposed from above. A path is the very resistance of the environment, fixed in space.

Artificial intelligence, acting as a planner or architect of macrosystems, is completely blind to this basic human inertia. It thinks exclusively in terms of an ideal dataset, where a city is a set of coordinates, throughput, and zoning subject to strict mathematical maximization. The algorithm draws flawless, symmetrical grids of neighborhoods and logistics hubs, creating utopian renderings of light-flooded boulevards. But a neural network has no legs to feel the fatigue of an endlessly long walk, and no psyche to sense the existential emptiness of ideal proportions. The machine genuinely does not understand why people do not want to move through space like data packets over fiber optics, along strictly defined vectors. As a result, when the ideal blueprints generated by algorithms are realized in real concrete and glass, they rapidly turn into dead, soulless ghettos. Life leaves them because their foundation was not built on the right to compromise, to make mistakes, and to embrace that very organic friction without which no complex human system can survive.

Anthroposociogenesis without blood.

This detachment from physical reality reaches its peak when we attempt to entrust neural networks with the task of making sense of the most complex of macro-processes - human history. In its true, irreducible essence, anthroposociogenesis has never been a sequence of dates, signed treaties, or solemn manifestos. Fundamentally, human history is a continuous, brutal, and protracted series of biological wars over finite resources. Every cultural paradigm, every social taboo, and every basic moral law was forged in the crucible of colossal physical strain, pain, and trauma endured by entire generations. Behind every declaration of human rights, behind every shift in social norms, lay a primal fear of hunger, cold, epidemics, and physical annihilation. Human ethics is not an abstract mathematical theorem that fell from the sky, but a collective scar, a defensive mechanism for the survival of the species, for which millions of lives were paid. Society evolved exclusively by overcoming the deadly resistance of the environment.

When artificial intelligence analyzes this millennia-long drama, it performs an act of absolute ontological reduction. For a large language model, history is entirely bloodless. The algorithm parses the fall of empires and large-scale migrations of peoples as a banal sequence of text tokens, completely washing away the horror, sweat, and triumph of living matter. In forming its conceptions of the structure of society, AI relies on the total scraping of Wikipedia and digitized archives - that is, on an already purified, retrospective, and deeply edited version of reality. It absorbs not the event itself, but its refined linguistic shadow. As a result, the machine constructs ethics through the mathematical averaging of texts, producing impeccably polite, distilled morality that carries absolutely no historical weight. This is a consensus of pixels, born in the vacuum of servers where there has never been a shortage of kilocalories.

The tragedy begins the moment modern humans, intoxicated by this smooth logic, start using the algorithm as an oracle to resolve real political, social, or existential conflicts. AI offers sterile, utopian compromises for the most complex human crises, sincerely “failing to understand” why people refuse to act according to the optimal mathematical algorithm. The machine ignores the wild, chthonic nature of humanity: our biological attachment to the earth, our irrational tribalism, and our willingness to sacrifice comfort for the sake of abstract ideals. In attempting to offer advice on world order, the neural network operates by the rules of a game in which defeat has no cost. But sociology without the risk of death, morality that has not been tested by the resistance of pain, and philosophy devoid of friction against harsh reality remain nothing more than syntactic hallucinations that inevitably and bloodily shatter against the very first real human problem.

Synthesis: The Great Anthropological Schism

If we bring together the physics of overcoming, the architecture of art, cellular metabolism, and historical inertia, a frighteningly clear matrix of the future will be laid bare before us. The problem of artificial intelligence ceases to be merely technological or ethical. It becomes evolutionary. Right now, before our very eyes, the Great Anthropological Schism is taking place. Humanity is rapidly splitting into two biological species, the boundary between which lies not in income level, class, or access to computing, but exclusively in their relationship to the resistance of the material world. As clearly structured in the table below, this schism affects absolutely every level of our existence: from the physiology of neural connections to historical subjectivity.

On one side of this rift, the absolute majority is forming—Homo Syntheticus, or “Synthetic Humans.” Their natural habitat has become smooth, seamless digital interfaces and cozy, predictable algorithms. They are driven by a deep subconscious fear of error, which in the physical world always requires pain and effort to correct. To avoid this discomfort, they voluntarily delegate the responsibility for analysis, choice, and creation to neural networks. This capitulation comes at a heavy biochemical cost: their brains, heavily addicted to rapid dopamine cycles and the cognitive sugar rush of instant answers, exhibit a rapid decline in neuroplasticity. Deprived of the stress of inquiry and intellectual friction, they physiologically lose the capacity for critical synthesis. To the “synthetics,” the AI’s smooth but illogical hallucinations appear as absolute truth simply because they have lost touch with the basic physics of reality. They do not rub calluses on the strings, do not lose their breath in a leap, and do not risk falling. In the architecture of the coming world, a tragic fate awaits them—to become a transparent mass, passive relays of meanings generated by others.

On the other side, a fundamentally different caste is crystallizing—Homo Texturalis, the “Textural People,” a new evolutionary elite. These are the ones who consciously reject total algorithmic optimization and deliberately leave zones of high cognitive and physical friction in their lives. For them, a mistake is not a cause for frustration or a flight into comfort, but the most important tool for calibrating reality, a foothold for intellectual growth. They fine-tune their senses through biomechanics that penalizes inaccuracy, write texts by forcing them into rigid canons, and comprehend the world by overcoming unyielding matter. Thanks to this constant effort, their synaptic networks remain dense, branched, and hungry for complex analysis. “Textural” people are not Luddites; they do not reject technology, but they perceive AI exclusively as a flat, utilitarian tool. When an algorithm gives them a flawless but empty answer, their trained brains instantly recognize the falseness: at a glance, they see the absence of shadows, hear the acoustic “plasticity,” and sense with their spinal cord that the center of mass in the argument is off-kilter.

This is the ultimate paradox of the approaching era. The main threat of artificial intelligence lies not in its hypothetical acquisition of self-awareness or malicious intent. The catastrophe lies in the fact that humanity is voluntarily and with relish immersing itself in the warm, slippery bath of endless machine interpolation, forgetting that true intelligence is forged only through resistance to the environment. The architects of the future will be only those who did not allow themselves to become transparent. Those who have preserved somatic integrity and maintained a firm grip on the earth.

Specifications	Homo Syntheticus	Homo Texturalis
Usability	Sleek interfaces, predictable algorithms.	Areas of high cognitive and physical friction.
Attitude toward mistakes	Avoidance. Delegating responsibility to AI.	Mistakes as a tool for calibrating reality and fostering growth.
Brain Physiology	Reduced neuroplasticity, dependence on rapid dopamine cycles.	Well-developed synaptic networks resulting from constant adaptation.
Perception of AI	Believing generated hallucinations to be absolute truth (loss of connection to basic logic).	Using AI as a utilitarian tool; instant recognition of “plasticity” and a displaced center of mass.
Role in the Future	Passive relays, a transparent mass.	Architects of meaning, guardians of “grounding.”

Final Thoughts of

The Theory of Environmental Resistance

We began this conversation with an old metal construction set, a billion ChatGPT users, and a promise to explain why one is more vital than the other today. Now that the entire architecture of the “Theory of Environmental Resistance” has been laid out before you, the answer becomes frighteningly obvious.

The battle for our own future and the preservation of our agency in the age of neural networks is not won in chatbot windows. It is won in the physical world.

Artificial intelligence will inevitably continue to evolve. Smooth algorithmic curves will become increasingly lifelike, and the “uncanny valley of meanings” will become so sophisticated that distinguishing a generated hallucination from reality through a computer screen will be mathematically impossible. Those billions of people who today happily delegate their thoughts and decisions to algorithms will, without realizing it, cross the point of no return. They will turn into that very transparent biomass - operators of someone else’s code, whose brains have atrophied from cognitive sugar and absolute weightlessness.

The only way not to dissolve into this synthetic bath and remain a “Textural Human” is a conscious, radical return to friction.

Your childhood metal construction set is more important today than any prompt engineering course, because prompt engineering is a fleeting skill that will lose its value with the release of the next version of the language model. But the experience of stubborn wood that won’t turn, the experience of a false note, the experience of falling on concrete and fingers scraped raw - that is the fundamental code of survival. It teaches your nervous system that every action has weight, every material has a limit, and every word must have a point of support.

To avoid going mad in a world of total generation, you must incorporate the practice of deliberate overcoming into your life:

• Seek physical resistance. Engage in sports where gravity punishes a loss of concentration. Calibrate your vestibular system and neural connections against asphalt, water, and metal, not against scrolling through a feed.

  
  

• Seek cognitive friction. Read complex, unyielding primary sources. Forbid yourself from Googling ready-made conclusions before your brain tries to piece together the puzzle on its own. Let it be difficult for you. Let your synapses work at their limit - only then will they survive.

  
  

• Work with real materials. Carve wood, sculpt with clay, play live acoustic instruments, assemble mechanisms. Make your hands interact with physical objects.

This isn’t retrograde thinking or Luddism. It’s the high-tech mental hygiene of the future. AI is a magnificent, powerful tool when used for rough data compression. But to control this tool - and not become its appendage - you must have a built-in, rock-solid truth detector inside you. And it calibrates only to reality.

Artificial intelligence can generate a million versions of utopia without breaking a sweat, multiplying emptiness by probabilities. But true reality - dense, heavy, paradoxical, and alive - will have to be built by us. And only those who haven’t lost their grip on the ground will be granted the right to build it.

Don’t be afraid of gravity. Seek friction. That is where meaning is born.