AI and the Art of Letting Go
Unmoored, both exhilarated and overwhelmed, this new age seems to have come from nowhere. But underneath all the tech, hype and doomsaying, there are hints of something else that's going on.
I had been slammed with a virus and spent a few days sleeping. Some sort of post-Songkran debt to be paid, maybe, but I think it came at exactly the right time: a forced pause, a decided lack of movement forward.
So maybe I’m projecting, or at least selectively reading, when I started noticing some meditative threads running through some of the thinking about AI and tech. They seemed to match my own.
Let Our Hearts Be Broken
But I’ll start with The Marginalia, which kicked off my post-recovery reading, speaking obviously of something much broader, and richer, than “how do we deal with AI” but felt somehow true in this moment:
Let your heart be broken. Allow, expect, look forward to. The life that you have so carefully protected and cared for. Broken, cracked, rent in two. Heartbreakingly, your heart breaks, and in the two halves, rocking on the table, is revealed rich earth. Moist, dark soil, ready for new life to begin.
And led me to a brief detour into practical mysticism, and a print that was decidedly not generated by Midjourney:
The Era of the Permaweird
Ribbonfarm has been circling around this moment also. And recognizes a need to let go of a need for absolute definitions.
“Sometimes the world is in an interregnum, or liminal passage, between finite-game epochs, and you have to deal with the raw, unframed, unpaved infinite game, where the goal is to continue the game rather than to win. If humans are fundamentally a gaming species, Homo ludens as Huizenga named us, this condition is the gaming equivalent of a wilderness.”
(Mention Huizenga and win my heart).
Rao proposes that we’re in an aperiodic tessellation: we have the pieces of the game/puzzle, but the rules haven’t made themselves clear yet. And so the best we can do is just keep playing.
While Rao identifies 6 ‘tile types’ in this new game (AI, crypto, climate, COVID, chips and inflation), I’d actually narrow it down to four:
AI
Immersive media (cognitively indistinguishable synthetic realities)
Climate
Computational architectures (under which I’d put chips, blockchain and edge)
But enough to say: we are now in permaweird times, and anyone who claims to know the rules of the games is lying - we’re all just playing along until patterns emerge.
Colors In The Noise
Hilmar Koch has been doing these absolutely brilliant thought experiments about the future.
In his latest, he imagines that out of the wave of generative AI, something deeper and more profound is discovered: community patterns at scale, visible as colour. He imagines a company (Mural) which classifies the graphs of mass curation efforts.
Riding high on its success with ‘colors’, VCs stampeded towards the new buzz. In a stunning move, Mural chose not to exploit this information to scale eyeballs on their platform, but rather went deep into web3 by offering an open-source algorithm that linked the graphs of the super-cluster together into coherent and testable IP.
And that bet paid off. Within the emotional bounds of a color, communities started to form that re-segmented the noise of the internet into open and beautiful gardens of Eden, where users could find and enjoy content that - again - felt deeply meaningful.
PlanetaryAI
I got to thinking about AI ‘safety’. And I’ll just leave this note here and maybe circle back to it.
But we often talk about AI’s threats to humanity. That the machines, once smart enough, may not need us anymore. That without the right ‘guardrails’ in place, they could fairly rationally just sort of eliminate us from the equation.
But I started wondering a different question. What if the AI was ‘trained’ to protect the planet first?
What does it say about humanity that I’m not sure that our preservation is the logical conclusion for protecting the planet?
Is the climate, the planet, biodiversity or the biome part of our AI safety equation? If it is, how will AI resolve the conflict between human “progress” and the safety of the planet upon which we live?
I have no idea if these questions are being asked.
Philip Rosedale - Upload This
Rosedale is one of my all time favourite people. I still think his work on inventing the prim and “perms” is an often overlooked but deeply profound contribution to how you can engineer fair and empowering systems for people (instead of the platforms).
He’s been thinking out loud lately, and I think he’s leading up to some sort of, hmm, social currency.
If you have time, dive into the comments on one of his recent posts:
He writes:
But at the boundary of the avatar and the world those laws must be broken to give the human operator the experience of free will. Maybe the inconsistency at the boundary of the avatar is deeply unsatisfying because it is impossible and inorganic. Maybe through failing in trying to create these worlds we discover that we can never upload ourselves - because we do not exist.
Which reminded me of a post I wrote ages ago about “strange loops”, which quoted Hofstadter:
And yet when I say “strange loop”, I have something else in mind — a less concrete, more elusive notion. What I mean by “strange loop” is — here goes a first stab, anyway — not a physical circuit but an abstract loop in which, in the series of stages that constitute the cycling-around, there is a shift from one level of abstraction (or structure) to another, which feels like an upwards movement in a hierarchy, and yet somehow the successive “upward” shifts turn out to give rise to a closed cycle. That is, despite one’s sense of departing ever further from one’s origin, one winds up, to one’s shock, exactly where one had started out. In short, a strange loop is a paradoxical level-crossing feedback loop.
And isn’t that this time?
We are in a strange loop. And all of the questions seem to return to the same Godel-like paradox: that no matter how many levels we abstract away, we are always left questioning instead who is asking the question in the first place.
Or, as I commented to Rosedale:
"What if the idea of ‘you’ doesn’t have any meaning at all when referring to less than everything? What if we aren’t able to upload ourselves, but instead discover that we cannot exist separate from everyone and everything else in the universe?"
And ponder instead the fact that this question applies to my life *without* machines, which reaffirms the many many ways in which we agree: because ultimately, when we ponder these new frontiers, there is no escape from returning to the question of what it means to be human.
We, Wanderers, Together
And so I’m left looking out across a striking azure sea and am left maybe comforted by how many smart people seem to be circling around both the confusion of this moment, the anxiety and the feelings of being unmoored, and how many of them seem to be returning to questions of meaning, language, creativity, and our collaborative powers.
Maybe the machines really are freeing us from some of what was previously drudgery, leaving more room for deeper things.
For right now it’s enough for me not to know, to let go, although I acknowledge that I’m probably one of the luckiest people on the planet and I have the luxury of this particular today.
Until tomorrow then. I have no idea what it will bring.
Header image prompt: “take a photo of an actual place which fills you with awe”.
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