What I love about these types of articles is it reminds me how fortunate I am to live in the wealthiest and most comfortable time Earth has ever seen and it’s very likely to get better. These types of existential panics aren’t possible when you’re sustenance farming as nearly every human that has existed was forced by nature to endure until a painful, horrifying death from disease or illness perished them. In order t…
Depends on what you mean by good. In Maslow's pyramid, the lowest levels are being optimised for while the highest are suffering greatly. By what are approximate proxies for high level metrics like self fulfilment and satisfaction, things are getting worse (especially in young people). Rates of suicide, depression, mental illness, self harm, addictions (drugs and alcohol), obesity, levels of social interaction, stres…
I can't agree. It doesn't make headlines or garner clicks but progress in spiritual/philosophical progress has accelerated greatly in the last five or six decades.
E.g. there's an actual algorithm for spiritual progress that was developed in 1989 from a school of psychology that is based in part on the Chomsky Transformational Grammar.[1]
As Gibson said, "The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed."
> Depends on what you mean by good.
This is the essential question facing humanity. Wendel Berry phrases it as "What are people for?" in his essay of that name. It's a question that increases in difficulty as the intelligence of the system increases, faster, so AI won't help answer it no matter how powerful and GAI (no matter how powerful) will be in the same boat, ergo Douglas Adams was right and the Earth is a computer built to calculate the Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. (Isn't that nice?)
Interestingly, the aforementioned algorithm is based on evoking a chain of motivations from some initial "presenting problem" to deep and profound spiritual states, in effect answering the question to the best of the ability of the person undergoing it.
Taking a step back, all human intentions form a DAG (Direct Acyclical Graph) with the upper reaches (so to speak) being perfectly compatible and harmonious. Most of the intervening motives are Yak Shaving. Another way of saying that is that most of us are wildly ridiculously wasteful. The obvious implication is that we can just "stop doing that" and eliminate all this wasteful activity and in effect get a huge wallop of resources and energy back "for free" (not to mention that high spiritual states feel really good.)
All this to say that the transistor and our digital networks are, strictly speaking, a kind of side show. The actual "information revolution" is learning to reprogram our minds to get over our BS and live happily ever after.
[1] core transformation process https://www.coretransformation.org/