Category: Social Commentary

  • A convenient path to extinction?

    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 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. Tech & Relationships: Something I missed in the original post is another connection between biology (nature) and tech. In their book The Molecule of More, Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long describe two kinds of relationships. “Agentic” relationships orchestrated by dopamine – formed to accomplish goals, very purpose-driven, and in contrast, “affiliative” relationships – formed for connection and enjoyment, driven by oxytocin. We all know the connection between tech and dopamine, and that’s probably why we are increasingly pushed to transactional agentic relationships.

    9. 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.

    10. 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.

  • Rootless

    In Lessons in Chemistry, Lewis Pullman’s character is an orphan (in real life, his father is Bill Pullman, who in other lives was a fantastic American President in the mid 90s and in the 2020’s was a tortured, but great detective). But I digress.

    His character is quite an achiever, but I don’t think that’s how the average orphan’s life goes. There are a lot of famous people who were orphaned, but subsequently adopted. I’d think that the number not adopted would be higher though, and in any case, we rarely know about unexceptional lives. Many of us who lose even one parent early in life feel the loss consciously or subconsciously. And I am reasonably sure it shapes our character and worldview. At least I can speak for myself. Even for those whose loss comes later in life – after their own lives are reasonably well established, there is the sudden jolting realisation that an unquestioning, non-judging backup, even if it was never used, is now gone forever.

    And so I wonder, what does it mean to live a life when it starts with rejection? How does it feel when they become conscious of it the first time? Does it happen when one among them get adopted? Is there loneliness, or does their bond with the others help them avoid that? What about a sense of privacy? Do they even get that, do they even think of that when they rarely have space of their own? What about ownership? How does the concept work when everything is practically shared?

    When they grow up, how does all this affect the way they engage with the world? What about expectations – from others, their own of themselves, or fulfilling someone else’s? Do their relationships suffer from the baggage of rejection? Does their behaviour with others get affected because of their (non) notions about privacy and ownership? How complex must it be for them to accept and receive love?

    Sometimes I think being raised by parents or even one parent is one of those privileges – like having a well-functioning body with all appendages intact, all sense organs working fine – that we easily take for granted. After all, we only have to reflect on the routes we want to travel in the journey of life, and that in itself is not easy. Imagine being rootless, unable to resolve where one came from.

  • Kaumpromise

    There is nothing quite like death to shake a worldview. There is a reset that happens in one’s head, and the relationship or even lack of it, changes this only in degree, not kind. There is no immunity either, by now, I’d know.

    This one took me out of my comfort zone, in terms of physical location. In the last year or so, especially since the previous time I encountered death, I’ve felt myself become a tad more dispassionate about Cochin as relationships seem a lot more fragile. I am myself much to blame, decades of muscle memory of holding others at arm’s length is hard to shake off. And this is beyond Cochin, and in a place where I have avoided staying for more than a night. Each time I have tried to tell myself that my creature comforts can be skipped for a few days, there has been a rebellion within and I’ve been forced to say “I can’t.”

    I brace myself this time too, and stood in a corner, observing others. I think we all are capable of projecting an aura of “do not approach” when we so want. Mine is at full blast. And yet, one child (whom I first knew as literally a child, and is now about to become a CA) breaks through it, and asks me if I I am ok, if I need anything. Maybe it is that, maybe it is the death gut punch, or maybe it is my newfound willingness to look at (at least some of) the world without a ‘transaction alert’ warning, but the next evening, I am at the table for evening tea, doing stuff I do when I am comfortable with people – pulling their legs, except these are people I had never even said a decent hello to. The day after, I am pushing someone to accept something the family feels he should take, and he is reluctant. They’re all crying, I think I might have forgotten how to. Says a lot.

    But the larger facade broke before that evening at the table, as I watch folks of all forms walk through the door to catch a last glimpse of the one who had passed. It strikes me that I didn’t know more than a few people who would care to drop in to see me before I went up in smoke. The image of an old man, barely able to move a few steps, break down in grief, is still alive in my mind. Sometimes, I realise, it takes death to understand the meaning of life.

    A few days later, I am back in Bangalore. I see the unhindered adulteration in packaged food, in the things that restaurants do, and in general, the greed in every seller, I wonder if that is what has been lost when faceless people sell things to faceless others. It is easier to not care when you don’t see the people you harm. That is not an option in a smaller community or at least it gets punished faster.

    I am also reminded of what else family and community can do when I read Milan Kundera’s brutal take (in Identity) on why friendship isn’t in vogue these days.

    Milan Kundera Friendship

    When I zoom out of my individualistic approach, I realise I had seen community the way it was meant to be. Life savings in cooperatives, because it’s a world in which everyone still knows everyone else or is just a degree of connection away. Local cable over OTT because births and deaths and important local news is covered in the former. It isn’t perfect, and I won’t romanticise it because I know I wouldn’t be able to tolerate the scrutiny beyond short bursts, but its manifestations are revelatory. As the insightful narrator in Gullak says, yeh trauma bhi hai aur therapy bhi. And I wonder what the proverbial middle path is.

  • Slowly and then suddenly…

    …because we’d like to have the best physical abilities that any species has in terms of moving, seeing, hearing, strength etc. From the mind’s perspective, an organ that could upgrade itself to store more, to experience more, to work faster, to be more accurate. And it doesn’t stop there – reading others’ minds, telepathy…

    We will see the beginning of all this in our lifetime. The progress might be slow, so slow that perhaps later generations wouldn’t realise how we’d lived without most of the artificial things that they would be taking for granted. How would this affect the experiences of life that we go through now – joy, sorrow, pain, ecstasy, spirituality?  How long before what we call human would give way to a being that would probably exist forever, possibly without living? Will they even realise it when it happens?

    The man… the machine

    This is from my first post on what I called the augmented human, back in 2009. And I continue to ask myself what the man-made man will be like.

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  • Three score and ten

    He was a shadow of his former self, and his memory was not what it used to be. But I could see his eyes light up when he was reminded of who I was. We spoke a bit, and I like to think that a bit of his joviality returned in those brief moments. My interactions with him are more than three decades old, and our memories of each other are probably a bigger bond than any relationship we have. He complimented my demeanour, much to the annoyance of the other M. He passed away a few weeks later. These days, I am ambivalent about meeting old people. On one hand, I think I’d like to remember them in their prime. But then again, there is a good chance that I’d be meeting them for the last time. So these days, when I do meet, my behaviour factors that in.

    The worst thing about death is the fact that when a man is dead it is impossible any longer to undo the harm you have done him, or to do the good you haven’t done him…They say: live in such a way as to be always ready to die. I would say: live in such a way that anyone can die without you having anything to regret.

    Leo Tolstoy, (via Arthur C. Brooks’ From Strength to Strength)

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