Humans Still Have Caveman Brains (Blue edit notes)

Humans still have monkey 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 monkey caveman brains in collaborations, and the fact that they are still, indeed, monkey 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.

Yes, we can create things. Some of the newest things we created are so complex that no one monkey caveman can fully understand. It’s quite debatable if a group of monkey cavemen can collectively understand the mechanisms of the machine ‘brains’ (define ‘collectively understanding’, define ‘understanding’).

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 (a first draft). There’s an alignment of different things (a very bad phrasing that deserves an elaboration of a paragraph, at minimum) 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. (as this entire text is WIP, the last sentence is a first draft)

Automating everything might not be an easy technical accomplishment, (This is 2018, some of it is still relevant to the text, I could replace to a more modern example later) 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?” (a first draft)

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 need must (at scale, scale of modern societies, yada yada agricultural revolution – locked in place due to crops and trade and specialty occupations and so on and so forth. Need to expand on that here or somewhere else) 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 (a generalization, of course, ‘human time’ differentiates a range of monetary values within it). Following Shumacher, if we desire to make (human) labor extinct, we are given the opportunity to replace ‘human time’ with ‘robot time’ using automation.

I argue we should think through the consequences. It doesn’t necessarily mean we ‘end money’, or do not have any other costs to implement and use ‘robot time’. To be clear, I don’t believe money is evil, nor is trade. If we all believe that we all believe green paper is good, we can use it as a device to achieve coordination-at-large. It unlocked human trust beyond our limited capacity of intimate social connections, therefore unlocked human collaboration across the geographical and temporal scales.

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 monkey 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 (define 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 (bad phrasing) like: wisdom, skills and expertise, community belonging, human know-how, craft knowledge and culture. (define all of the above)

Next reads:
-The worldviews behind the efforts of Henry Ford and gang
-Fourth Industrial Revolution stuff
-and a lot more (Indy Johar, Byung Chul-Han, Mikael Jakobsson & Laurel Carney, Martin Krzywdzinski, Michael L. Tushman, Daniel Pink, Thomas W. Malone, Andrew McAfee?)

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

Next Write:
-How good did we do the recent nearly fully automation (coding --> vibe-coding) and what can we learn from it before touching other labor