Technology

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.

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.

Dopamine is a chemical in our brains associated with good feels. Rather than explaining it myself, I’ll share a quote from the book “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion”, (pp. 102-103):

All animal brains are designed to create flashes of pleasure when the animal does something important for its survival, and small pulses of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the ventral striatum (and a few other places) are where these good feelings are manufactured. Heroin and cocaine are addictive because they artificially trigger this dopamine response. Rats who can press a button to deliver electrical stimulation to their reward centers will continue pressing until they collapse from starvation.