Category: Ideas

  • Reflections on my OS – 3

    Part 1 was on the OS of my life, Part 2 the professional version, both written in 2022. This one is a little more ambitious – civilisational!

    The thought stream started thanks to one of my favourite newsletters, which gave me an insightful metaphor – “Religion is the operating system of a civilisation” – attributed to Rudyard Lynch.

    One of the other insights that has taken up quite a lot of space in my mind is courtesy Ernest Becker (via The Worm at the Core) – that the awareness of our own mortality is the hidden engine of human thought, emotion, and culture. Humans apparently invented symbolic systems – everything from soul to religion to nation to art to legacy as a means of managing the terror of death.

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  • Artificial Culture

    It’s almost a year and a half since I wrote In Code we Trust. More recently, Tim Ferriss had Eric Schmidt on his podcast (transcript). In what I thought was a fascinating discussion based on the latter’s recent book  The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, (coauthored with Henry A. Kissinger and Daniel Huttenlocher), they also brought up AlphaGo. Go was a game that humans had been playing for 2,500 years, and it was thought to be incomputable until DeepMind’s AlphaGo beat world champions. As Schmidt explained, some of its moves and strategies were the kind no one had thought of before. In Kissinger’s words, we’re entering a new epoch, similar to the Renaissance, this age of artificial intelligence, because humanity has never had a competitive intelligence, similar to itself, but not human. To note, a more recent version – AlphaGo Zero self-taught itself without learning from human games, and surpassed its predecessor in 40 days!

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  • A digital multiverse

    It was towards the end of 2020 that I came across Roblox and wrote Metaverse : Get a second life. Since that post, Mathew Ball has written the definitive primer on the Metaverse1, and if you’re interested in the subject, it’s a must-read. The word “metaverse”, ICYMI, was coined by Neal Stephenson in Snow Crash, and the book is being referenced in many recent conversations. In fact, Stephenson has been quizzed for years, each time we seem to take a step in this direction, and his comments continue to be prescient, insightful and hugely creative. This one, from 2017, in Vanity Fair, is a favourite, and contains, among other succinct gems

    The purpose of VR is to take you to a completely made-up place, and the purpose of AR is to change your experience of the place that you’re in.

    Neal Stephenson
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  • $ocial Validation

    The presentation of selfie in everyday life is all around us, and the words I always refer to paraphrase this are

    When everything becomes image rather than action, you can’t judge the value of any act. You can only judge what it “looks like”. But when all of society is doing that, it means that you’re being judged on everything. After all, you may not always be acting, but you are always appearing. When it’s your appearance that determines worth, there is no moment to rest. There’s a social invasion.

    The Uruk Machine
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  • Default in our stars

    The thought first occurred to me a couple of years ago, when I realised that thanks to outsourcing and automation, we would struggle today to do many things that were once life skills. We also lost a little more than that – learning.

    Sometimes directly, and sometimes, through the interactions with the world, they facilitated a learning experience that taught one how to navigate the world and the different kinds of folks that made up its systems. 

    Regression Planning

    It was continued with a bit more specificity in a subsequent post.

    Instagram, Facebook, Tinder, Spotify, Netflix, Amazon – everything is a feed of recommendations, whether it be social interactions, music, content or shopping! Once upon a time, these were conscious choices we made. These choices, new discoveries, their outcomes, the feedback loop, and the memories we store of them, all worked towards developing intuition. 

    Intelligence, intuition and instincts. The journeys in the first two are what have gotten the third hardwired into our biology and chemistry. When we cut off the pipeline to the first two, what happens to the third, and where does it leave our species?

    AI: Artificial Instincts
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