Rose-tinted wearables

(a version of something I wrote on LinkedIn)

Now that I think of it, there are at least four ‘spiritual predecessors’ for this post on the blog. It began with ‘In a world of abstractions‘ (2017), followed by Peak Abstraction (2018), The Presentation of Selfie in Everyday Life (2020), and A Proxy Life (2022). Each of them are continuing explorations of how we have abstracted a bunch of real things, and created proxies by which we measure them.

Going by the story so far, it’d be fair to say that the more things we consume, the less time we have to get into details, and the more we rely on proxies. And across time, our consumption has only increased. And so our proxies have also multiplied.

Material accumulations as a proxy for wealth

Stock price/funding for a company’s health

Popularity for excellence

Price for quality

Fitness for health

Books Read (including that 5 min YouTube video) for intellect

This had already gone berserk in the social era, and now in the AI era, as consumption accelerates, we continue to outsource our judgment to proxies. A few directions I thought this could take.

1. The algorithms we built for measurement will end up ‘training’ us on what to value. This is already happening btw. Likes over liking/likeability. Virality over value. AI learns from what we reward, so it optimises more for the proxy than the purpose. Think Paperclip Maximiser. That’s a thought experiment, but human capitalists are already doing that with ‘shareholder value’, and Open AI’s own Coastrunners is a good example. A boat racing game, where the reward was points. The AI learned to ignore the race entirely and instead circle around a few “turbo” power-ups that yielded continuous points, effectively “winning” by the given metric but failing the actual goal of racing!
2. Authenticity won’t be just what we show – it’ll have to be what we can’t fake. When AI allows us to easily game proxies and make everyone seem fitter, smarter, richer, more creative, and everything seems valuable with fake demos and reviews and so on, we will need new signals of authenticity. Ones that are difficult to fake. I am not entirely sure how that can be done.
3. Reality will become a setting and authenticity a filter, and neither will be our default. We will be comfortable with what we call inauthentic now. I think it’s already happening and we are all frogs in boiling water. All of us would be wearing some version of a rose-tinted wearable behind which we could hide all our perceived inadequacies in the name of privacy. At least in terms of perception, reality would be optional. Life would be reelistic. 

As you might notice, I am not an optimist about these things at all, because what brought us this far – cliched, but ‘sharing and caring’ – is becoming rarer and rarer. I have said earlier that the human species were nature’s singularity event, I guess it is poetic that AI will eventually be ours.