Humans Still Have Caveman Brains

Humans still have caveman brains. We were not invited to GodCon and received a secret access link to preorder Brain12ProMax. As a result, we live in quite the dissonant reality we multi-handedly created. One of the consequences of this dissonance between the networked complexities we’ve achieved through joining our caveman brains in collaborations, and the fact that they are still, indeed, caveman brains, is that we don’t always think beyond now-now. Perhaps because we won’t live out to experience the consequences in the long now.

Point to be made here – We clearly are not skilled enough at managing long term consequences of our creations. Therefore, the fact we could do a thing does not originate a legitimacy to the fact that we should do a thing. A couple fun examples include: Incinerating trash, using (nuclear) weapons, going on unpaid internships, slavery. Given we still live the long term consequences of decisions prior cavebrains made, a debatable portion of-which are not all that great, I propose we should take a moment to think about the following – The fact that we could, doesn’t mean that we should.

Enter automation, the physical AI shindig and the word ‘Work’. As a social structure, as a concept, ‘Work’ is having a moment of paradigm shift. ‘Work’ is not only productivity: it is a civic sorting machine, a socio-technical ritual, a ranking device, a moral language of worth, and a schedule that synchronizes bodies at scale. There’s an alignment of different things which creates a window of opportunity for us to reshape the concept, in a way that integrates new values into the structure. I’d propose care, learning, civic contribution, creative practice, new legitimacies, new scales of community.

Automating everything might not be an easy technical accomplishment, but it is the intellectual easy way out. As automation expands, the questions are less “will jobs disappear?” or “what will I do to earn my living?”, and more “How do we make the decisions on which are the right parts to automate?” “How do we make the decisions on which are the right parts to delegate?” “What role has work played as an organizing principle of social life?” and “What happens when that role weakens?”

In his book ‘Small is Beautiful’, E.F Schumacher proposed that we (subjects of the modern neoliberal economic systems) currently perceive ‘Work’ (or ‘labor’) as a necessary evil in our economy. From the employer’s perspective - it’s a cost he must pay in order for his business to run. From the employee’s perspective, it’s a cost he must pay in order to afford his leisure. Both parties who engage with ‘work’ are incentivized to diminish it for their own good. No one really wants it. Schumacher then goes on to introduce us to the concept of ‘Buddhist Economics’ where under its definition ‘work’ offers three distinct opportunities for cavemen: a chance to practice and hone our skills, a chance to get our heads out of our butts and collaborate to contribute to something outside of ourselves, and a chance to produce what we must in order to exist as communities. I resonate with this. To me it’s essentially acknowledging the importance of craft & social connections as baseline spiritual features for civilization alongside the materialistic necessities we require to stay alive.

Now there begins one of the de-couplings that facilitate the paradigm shift in work: time no longer equals money, in a straightforward sense, anyway. This has radical implications and puts us in what I believe is a crucial crossroads. When the alternative of using ‘robot time’ became a viable technical option, ‘human time’ started losing its linear relationship to it’s monetary value. Following Shumacher, if we desire to make (human) labor extinct, we are given the opportunity to replace ‘human time’ with ‘robot time’ using automation.

There lies the opportunity to analyze ‘human time’ and try to understand which parts of it do we want to automate, how much, and why. I have the deep notion I cannot yet reason, that we shouldn’t fuck with the caveman brain mechanism of effort-and-reward. I mean we already hacked it a bunch of times (from synthetic sugar to TikTok) so no doubt it exists, but arguably none of these hacks had beneficial implications on us as a race in the long run. I don’t oppose automation, the use of machine-intelligence, or the partial handover of labor to ‘robot time’. We just shouldn’t rush to it like the solutionistic morons that we usually are. I think we should do it in a way that acknowledges enhances and retains things like: wisdom, skills and expertise, community belonging, human know-how, craft knowledge and culture.

Next reads:
-The worldviews behind the efforts of Henry Ford and gang
-Fourth Industrial Revolution stuff

Next missions:
-Physical AI state of the art review
-Framework stress testing
-Getting ready for Milestone #2 presentation