Technology

Take a walk on any given day these days, and instead of staring at your phone, try looking around. If you want to do this on hard mode, leave the phone at home if you can manage. You may notice that many people are engrossed in whatever is going on on their own devices, as opposed to existing in the reality around them.

Thought leaders worldwide have been weighing in on the AI mania that has gripped the world. There are many amusing predictions, some of which are on the doomsday end of the spectrum and others that are more optimistic. But one thing is clear: whatever happens, biology will self-correct. Biology is OG technology: it has been around for billions of years and has had a really, really long time to perfect itself. One neat thing about biology is how evolution is self-correcting: failures and errors are weeded out, and the best solutions are kept and allowed to flourish. Humans do much to stop this process, but it still happens. We spend a lot of time trying to pick the winners and losers, but ultimately nature decides.

When people think of technology they likely imagine your typical futurology: robots, artificial intelligence, and space travel. But technology is more interesting than science fiction porn. It’s the way we manipulate the world around us. It’s the way we shape our environment to suit our needs. And in that sense, cities are technology.

John Maynard Keynes coined the term “animal spirits” to describe the human emotions that drive consumer confidence. In the age of AI hype, we see new animal spirits emerge as we lose connection with reality and all cheer for a new algorithmically driven future of generated clickbait, crappy art, incorrect “facts”, and a flood of low-quality content.

There’s a trope in New York City that you can identify tourists from their propensity to walk around staring up at the tall buildings. This isn’t necessarily meant to be interpreted literally, but rather it’s more about the fact that the tourists are taken aback by everything to look at, much of which is in the upward direction depending on where you are in the city.

Humans have accomplished some remarkable things throughout our history. Today, however, despite all we’ve accomplished, it feels like we’re backsliding while the world burns. We face some enormous challenges, but there’s no evidence of progress aside from some political and corporate greenwashing and virtue-signaling campaigns to keep us all consuming (aka “business as usual”).

In a time when every company is trying to collect as much of your private data as possible and either opaquely or overtly use it to drain your bank account for their own gain, we can’t do a whole lot to maintain privacy. Governments are not only complicit, but generally speaking those in power love to reduce your access to privacy because mass surveillance is inevitable for any late stage empire.

Okay okay, I realize this is a click-baity subject, but I couldn’t help myself. I see a lot of confusion on the internet and elsewhere about VR, the “metaverse”, Facebook’s pivot, and the cringeworthy marketing content (which you can skip unless you love buzzwords and egregious use of terms like “collaboration” and “AI”). The whole thing is oddly reminiscent of an episode of Star Trek.

For a long time I was a futurist, and an optimist about technology in general. I agreed with the thesis that technology makes everything better over time. These days, I’m older and (maybe?) wiser, and I’ve become a lot more pessimistic about technology in general. Can our fossil fuel machines save us from the problem created by fossil fuels? 🤔

The ISOC recently sold the .org TLD registry to a private equity firm for $1.1b. What this means, in the grand scheme of things, remains to be seen, but many people around the web have expressed disapproval. Doge contemplating the Internet, and squirrels