It has been almost exactly 4 years since I wrote Default in our Stars. I ended that post with
A question I asked myself while writing this was, when there is no agency, what happens to morality? My own first answer was worrying – maybe you just become numb to life’s deeper questions because there’s always an algorithm to give you something you didn’t know you wanted. And that’s the panacea that this age warrants. And hence default in our stars, and an artificial existence.
Sometime back, a comment on an advertisement I had shared on LinkedIn on World Suicide Prevention Day led me to think again on the subject. I had a bunch of thoughts, and after I had framed it myself, I took the help of everyone’s favourite assistant to break it into 9 byte sized points. Given my (lack of) expertise, it’s a reach, but I love my curiosity. 
So here we go, picking up specifically from the point of societal impact – reduced interactions, as algos increasingly recommend everything.
1. Human Interaction Decline: Before the Industrial Revolution, getting things done required relatively more human interaction. Since then, it has been declining. From real marketplaces to supermarkets to telephone operators to a faceless internet and so on.
2. App-Driven World: Now, apps have taken over many tasks that previously required a human touch — answering a question, booking a cab, planning vacations, ordering a meal, buying from the local shop — are all done with increasingly reduced human involvement.
3. Command & Gratification: Apps obey without asking for explanations, giving us control and instant gratification. “Click to order”. In parallel, social media provides gratification through validation – likes, comments etc, again something that formerly happened only IRL
4. Centre of the Universe Mindset: This on-demand gratification makes us feel like the centre of our own universe, where every gratification is possible and tailored for us, fast and friction-free. A perception that everything is my way on the information highway.
5. Human Interaction = Tedious?: As human interactions inherently involve alternate perspectives and unpredictability, they can seem more ‘tedious’ in comparison to seamless app transactions.
6. Natural Selection’s Role: Here’s where natural selection comes in. Entropy is relentless, and the one force that is equally relentless in trying to stop it, is natural selection. Evolution thus tries to increase order in successive iterations. That’s also how humans got here.
7. Tech’s Push for Efficiency: In general, app interactions are more predictable than human ones, aligning with this drive for less entropy. For instance, Urban Company/Uber have automated much of this already, helping us choose predictability and efficiency over complexity in daily transactions.
8. Blockchain’s Faceless Trust: So, where is this going? As D pointed out when I chatted with her on this, blockchain takes this further with its “faceless, trustless” system of certainty. It’s arguably the next step in reducing unpredictability.
9. AI and the Future: AI, despite its hallucinations, will likely bring even more predictability in both outputs and outcomes. But what does that mean for our place in this increasingly transactional world? Honestly, I’m still figuring that part out. 
The WEIRD mindset has moved beyond its original strongholds and is becoming increasingly dominant across the globe. Money, society’s favourite currency, demands it. Munger has famously said “Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome“. It is ironic that at a species level, there might be a desire to survive, but that, at an individual level, the WEIRD penchant for autonomy and predictability is overriding it. Natural selection will have no qualms about its means of reducing entropy coming at the cost of an entire species.
