ANUVA

I don't trust anyone's AI risk assessment. I don't think we know what awaits us. Given that, I'm choosing to be optimistic, betting an existence more extraordinary than we can imagine sits on the other side and it's worth fighting for.

Kate and I spent the weekend forest bathing. A cabin in deep woods, a river feeding the ocean, tides marking the day. We hiked, watched, listened, and smelled. We let the quiet settle. By Sunday morning, my resting heart rate dropped by 10%. The storms of the modern world were shedding. We were eating lunch inside while looking out onto the serene river, playing 20 questions. As we probed to discover what object the other had identified, we watched several flies struggle against the glass as they tried to get outside. It was beyond their intellectual capacity to understand the concept of glass and to improvise a plan to take an alternative route to get back where they belonged. In our normal gaze we look past the flies to the trees and the river. Kate and I wondered what else we miss moment to moment. Most of it, probably. We are powerful and weak, all-seeing and oblivious, free and trapped. The modern world is our glass. On Sunday morning I asked Kate to draw what she was feeling. She was reading a book and sketched onto the open page, which happened to be the dedication and read “sine qua non”, the one without whom, not. The quiet of the forest sharpened what I could notice. The flies on the window. Kate across the table. A dedication in a borrowed book that became, by accident, hers to me. Are all trapped behind glass we cannot see?

5-MeO-DMT gave me a single idea that won't leave. Our minds are not naturally capable of understanding the preciousness of our existence. Not "life is precious" as printed on a poster. It's something much more specific. That the hardware we're running, human consciousness, cannot render the full resolution of what it means to be here. Like a 480p screen trying to display an 8K image. The information is there but the display can't hold it. It's been 3 weeks and I still feel childlike and fresh. My mind feels free of the accumulated barnacle. My dreams are alive. The brain data is now coming in and it matches my reported subjective experiences. I'm excited to share it with you. But the data doesn't complete the picture. The feeling is that I found a home I didn't know I was looking for and I don't have a biomarker for that.

Talmage’s bike took flight, stunning his friends. He flew one lap around the school and landed safely by the jungle gym.  Jasper approached and fist-pumped “respect Talmage for not giving up.” My six-year-old son is tucked into bed, his eyes are lit up. These stories feel real to him. Every night we do this. He tells me about his day and then I make up a story with him as the protagonist. In them, he invents, overcomes hardship, deals with difficult relationships, and learns. We navigate the world together through story. I tuck him in and kiss him good night. As I leave his room and head into the family room, my heart sinks. My partner is there on the couch waiting for me. She’s upset and wants to talk. I don’t. We’ve had this same fight, I don’t even know how many times. It feels like insanity to me. I’m still reeling from the stress of the day. It was warfare. I’m the founder of a payments company; the battle never ends. My depression is raging. I am numb to existence. I’m overweight, inflamed, sleep deprived, and feel no hope for anything. We recite the same words, and resolve nothing. I want to be an opossum and play dead. It’s too much. The brownies. There’s a pan in the kitchen. Imagining eating them drips dopamine in my brain, giving me momentary reprieve from the pain of life. As I walk into the kitchen, I decide on one bite only. I can’t overeat again. The top button on my pants can’t be buttoned and it drives me crazy. I refuse to surrender and buy bigger pants. One bite becomes half the pan. The brownies win again. I now feel sick. I’ve repeated this situation, what, hundreds of times? Why do I do this to myself? The situation is absurd. My hands never disobey. My mind, however, a masterpiece of evolution, disobeys itself to commit self harm. How do I negotiate with this malfunction? I spend my day building software. We define an objective, write lines of code, and the software does what it’s instructed to do. Reliably. Yes, there are bugs and the software needs some upkeep, but it doesn’t steal away and act on runaway impulse.  Why can’t I build myself like software? Not to perfect but to author. It feels like such a catastrophic waste of my intelligent existence to be enslaved to impulse. My brain has 86 billion neurons and 100 trillion synaptic connections. My body is an elegant orchestra of over 30 trillion cells. Surely this precious gift can be used for more virtuous purposes. It must. Otherwise how will humans survive in the age of AI?  I mean, if we look all the way back, what is intelligent existence if not the continuous scaffolding and automation to higher levels of complexity. Fire freed our ancestors from certain caloric and dietary restrictions, which opened up energy (metabolism and time) for things like language and society to develop. Hand stitch to loom. Wagons to horses to the combustion engine. Abacus to computers. Whitehead captured it: “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.” Could I reframe that and apply it to myself? Bryan Johnson advances by extending…. I need protection from threats too. The brownies are the enemy. They are a civilization that eats itself. I’m vulnerable because these addiction patterns found their way into my biology at a young age. Sugar cereals, sugar soda, and highly processed foods. What strength do I have to fight with? Will power is fickle. What if I could enable my heart, liver and lungs to speak, allowing them to provide status updates and express their needs. Then what if those needs could be automatically addressed by other systems including nutrition, exercise, sleep, medications and therapies. The technology isn’t there yet for this to be fully automated. But maybe I could build an analog system. In the future, maybe this system will run autonomously. People will hear this and surely say that we humans are not machines. We are living, breathing, chaotic, emergent systems of intelligence and this would sack the joy out of life. I understand that perspective. Also, maybe that’s a story we tell ourselves. We’re already more automation than decision. We exist because and thanks to automation. Digestion, wound healing, our immune systems. Our bodies run without our consent. Most of our thoughts and emotions are pre-programmed. What exactly is one holding onto? Wouldn’t this be the ultimate realization of freedom and transcendence? Interrupting the philosophical considerations, practicality begs our attention. With AI, we must adapt and evolve or fade into fossils. Automation is our near-term destiny. Why not lean into it? But what will we become? That’s the existential question every generation born of technology gets to ask. I’m curious and want to explore.  I’m going to build this. I’ll call it my Autonomous Self.

Kids can’t sleep tonight because they’re too excited for tomorrow morning 🎄. Adults can’t sleep because they’re thinking about all their problems. Soon we’ll all become kids again. Sleep tight.