Khen

I worry about the malaise of abundance. Comfort is good but not without its cost to the body & mind. The body needs a bit of resistance to be its best self. The mind needs a bit of challenge to unlock new dendrites & neural pathways. The outsourcing of thought through artificial intelligence is likely to make already sterile minds even more sterile-those who are not collaborators with the technology but dependents. It would be like crack to an addict or sugar to the tongue. Ease is not the panacea it is made out to be. The human body was designed to go thousands of miles to endure great hardship. The comfort of air conditioned buildings & vehicular movement has made rot of otherwise physically active & healthy bodies. What used to be free exercise for the body is now replaced by paid gym subscriptions. While inorganic sugars or processed foods scale, they do far greater harm to the body than the fibre-based equivalent of Whole Foods. A peak athlete today would not hold a candle to your regular ancestor from half a millennium ago. The damage technology has done to the average body is about to be accelerated to the average mind. Of course progress is inevitable & should not be resisted but its inevitability is precisely the reason why careful consideration of its effects should be front & centre. Consider for a moment that the effects of processed foods were considered before & during its advent rather than an after-thought. The threat of A.I. is not just of some rogue agent with full autonomy, acting of its free will to start WWIII or worse, activate—or at least instigate—nuclear war that forever extinguishes our species. It’s the mental retardation of our species or at least segments of said species. Make no mistake AI is both a force multiplier & a gap amplifier. It would make astute decision makers & cerebral thinkers faster & better at execution but it would make lethargic thinkers even more disadvantaged. The same way Reels/Tinder swipes/TikTok/Snapchat has created an attention span crisis; there will be no greater gulf between thinkers & consumptive dependents. I worry not just about the individual but for fragile societies. Societies with precarious education systems (at best) will be trumped by those breeding the precocious. AI will accelerate brainrot for the consumptive. We have seen what a well calibrated algorithm can do; now layer super intelligence on that. You get a biblical scale extinction of (cogent) thought. Writing is a critical precursor for thinking. In fact, one can go as far as to say, to write well is to think well. A.I. is replacing original thought. Writing is under threat of being relegated to the state of the hieroglyphs. When your ability to write is under attack ; your ability to think is under attack. What is left of a society whose focus is already under attack (by way of swipe-based dopamine reinforcements, or simply put, social media) being flanked by an assault on thought? This is not sensationalism; this is not fear-mongering. This is simply cogent concern. One must fortify the mind as one protects one’s focus. Perhaps the incontestable & pristine exemplar of focus; Steve Jobs, famous for asking “what did you say no to, today?”—a way of emphasizing & reinforcing his tenet of focus—was responsible for unveiling perhaps the singular most distractive device of the 21st century. It would be no less than a decade after the invention of the iPhone before guardrails on focus were instituted by the phone maker. In today’s timeline, technology accelerates geometrically that I would go as far as to say, heuristically, 3 years today is worth 10 in the past. We may have been better off assessing the effects the iPhone (the AppStore and various apps) would have on focus as we considered the viability of (mobile) AppStores vs. html5 in the recent past. I close by saying, remember that to simply read a book undistracted or write original works is to rebel against this onslaught.

The depths of a functional society offers benefits beyond just sustenance. In a dysfunctional society; the only social status that is conferred on you is your wealth status. Because there’s no baseline of sufficiency, you’re reduced to a bank balance or a fancy car, or worse, who is your father? When there is no baseline safety net, we cannot appreciate brilliance, creativity or intellectual rigor as social markers. Steve Jobs was a billionaire, Walt Disney successful; but their wealth were byproducts of their more revered social markers—brilliance. You cannot have meaningful friendships that are not hinged on exploitation or entitlement. For a lot of people who think they are engulfed in affection; the minute you strip away the benefits you provide, said “friends” true colors show and you see that these friendships are more parasitic than symbiotic. Once a person ascends the tax bracket of his cohorts, he must now pay black tax or be burdened by strife. When you have a dysfunctional economy as a spawn of a dysfunctional society; romantic endeavors are reduced to transactions. When you live in dysfunction, politeness is always missing in action and skepticism is heightened. Well calibrated genuflection or overt sycophancy is the substitute for neighborliness. It must be bought by (perceived) wealth status and not good old fashioned human decency. You’re always on guard. You walk down the street in the market, you clutch your bag tighter. You do not take people at their word and we embellish these failings with platitudes such as “African time”. To be skeptical of every interaction is to live in a constant state of alertness. Heightened alertness is a constant state of survival mode. Survival mode has physiological consequences that culminate in reduced life expectancy. The human body was not designed to live in DEFCON 2 every day of your adult life. In dysfunction, you live most of your adult life entirely for your children and rarely ever for yourself, only to barely hit the mark if at all. And for your children to repeat the cycle all over again in hopes of securing the futures of your grandchildren. As (Financial) Capital finds efficient use. Human Capital migrates away from dysfunction and further robs society of any sense of balance. In a dysfunctional society of survival mode; the collective consciousness is short circuited and biased towards short term benefits bereft of long term thinking. No, the “elites” are not immune to this; they’re in fact the first causality. There is no multi generational thinking. There is no grand design; there is only the urgency for security of self and progeny. Their tragedy is greater as it is only just to measure a man’s outcomes by his potential. Who then is guilty of greater brainrot; the uneducated survivalist or the “exposed” elite? Dysfunction is not just penury of coffers but also of mind and soul…