On finding your own meaning and the rise of the machines
Sometimes, you might have a day when you wonder what it is you bring to the world that’s of value. You might even look at your existence on this blue planet and wonder about the meaning of it all.
I’ll say now that it feels like the meaning, the true meaning, is either too deep to comprehend, or so simple and obvious that we’ve been missing it all along. Perhaps, in our own consciousness, we struggle with this search for meaning because we’re aware of the dizzying array of possibilities that exist. A life contains a series of choices that gradually limit themselves in number until the very last breath. But until that breath, our decisions ripple and spiral and twist and turn in fractal shapes, and we have more power to influence the course of our lives than we may think.
Our meaning, as a species, may be to be good people. That may mean people who can love. People who can build what needs to be built and remove what needs to go. People who can undertake a human purpose with nobility and maybe even grace. All of those things are constructions of my own imagination, and it may be that meaning — your meaning, my meaning, everyone else’s meaning — is self-constructed, at least in part, and shaped by our choices, experiences, and beliefs.
Self-constructed meaning doesn’t, on its own, mean that truth or some deeper layer of shared meaning doesn’t exist. It may be that we all have multiple meanings, and it may be that there are multiple ways in which all of our lives are meaningful. For example, I’m a father, a son, a partner, a pilot, a writer, and so on and so forth. All of those areas add meaning and richness to my own life. The same kind of multi-layered construction of meaning may be true for you, as well.
I’m leaning toward a layers of meaning approach to life on nothing more than a hunch. That may seem, at least on the surface, to be shaky ground on which to build the foundation of a belief system. And I’ll freely admit that I follow hunches when they feel true in the deep way that certain truths can resonate inside us. I believe that one of the ways in which we can grow as humans is to integrate the wisdom of body feelings and hunches with our own intellect. We can have gut feelings and heart feelings and liver feelings. We can have tingling arm and leg feelings and spine feelings. Our cells are linked together through a nervous system and share a common origin, so it doesn’t seem too far fetched to think that there’s intelligence in how we feel, even if it can be difficult or impossible to point to the origin of a feeling. Not to mention, the notion that the rational mind is the only reservoir of meaning can lead us down a path that feels spiritually empty and inhuman.
Our bodies speak to us, and it’s up to us to listen.
I’ll come back to consciousness now. More specifically, conscious awareness. I ask myself if it’s enough to simply observe each present moment. On some level, observation feels like a minimum level of action, barely more than a ripple of consciousness. It’s seeing the clouds change forms and go from marshmallows to dragons and back to marshmallows. It’s breathing and following the rise and fall of your breath. It’s sharing some intimate touch with your partner and feeling your body light up as time stops.
What I notice in myself is that I often judge the quality of my conscious experience. I layer on should statements.
I should be using my time better.
I should be doing my laundry.
I should be looking for a new job.
I find myself consistently berating myself for not making more productive use of my time. Maybe it’s a DamnYankee thing, from having grown up in Maine. Maybe it’s just my own wiring, constantly wanting to do more, be more, achieve more. To be human seems to involve a lot of should. And yet, I wonder if it really needs to be that way. Do we really need to carry all those heavy shoulds with us?
Imagine living in the woods with your tribe. You have the foresight to know that if you don’t hunt, you and your tribe will be hungry at night. But instead of thinking, I should hunt, the thought that goes through your mind is I need to hunt. So you get your spear or your bow and arrow and you form a hunting party and you go out and catch and kill dinner. You bring it back to your tribe and you feast.
It’s deadly serious work, because if you can’t hunt with regular success you might starve or be ostracized, and there’s also the possibility of grievous bodily harm or death during the hunt itself if you’re going after big game or have other predators in the vicinity that may be hunting you. But even though it’s serious work, there’s a simple goal. To eat and feed your family. And that lets you go into the hunt with a light heart, because you know it’s your purpose. Should is nowhere to be found.
While you may not need to hunt to put food on the table, it seems to me that fulfilling a need will always be more gratifying that fulfilling a perceived obligation. Just think about peeing when you really need to go. You probably do that daily.
Where modern life adds weight and unhappiness is with its multiple layers of should. We often confuse our needs with our obligations, and assign similar weights to both. The digital realm is an especially destructive force in that regard. Multiple social networks vie for our attention and engagement. They manipulate us into sharing and liking and commenting, until the thoughts that we have about our digital lives feel every bit as serious as the thoughts a hunter might have around catching dinner.
You might think there’s a certain hypocrisy in speaking this way of our online worlds while also publishing these thoughts online. My reply to that is twofold. First, this is not a call to completely renounce technology. It’s simply a call to rise above the technology that, for all practical purposes, addicts and enslaves us. It’s a call to use the technology as a master and not a slave.
Speaking of masters and slaves, how much influence and power do the true masters of technology hold? With a few lines of code, the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world can make us spend millions more collective hours scrolling and clicking. And Jeff Bezos and his team can induce us to spend billions of dollars on things that may, in all likelihood, end up in landfills.
There aren’t all that many people controlling the flow of information and attention. And those who control our information and attention have the capacity to shape our beliefs, thoughts, and subsequent actions. We have, in many cases, become pawns, easily moved on the global chess board by the technological chess Grand Masters.
Even more disturbing is the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This is a technology that allows us to outsource complex human decision making to machines. With AI, ethics become nothing more than the byproducts of algorithmic rules.
While AI may seem like a godsend for reducing our reliance on the imperfection of humans for making decisions, just imagine AI air traffic controllers. Or AI pilots. If you’re at all aware of the flaws in the Tesla AI that led to traffic accidents, you can imagine how the circumstances might look if AI started running more of the show.
You can’t outsource humanity to a robot. And when things go sideways, a robot isn’t going to take responsibility and show remorse. Not to mention, the people behind the AI could have the convenient air cover of claiming that the machine made a decision that was too complex to understand.
Do we really need to engineer AI to act as the perfect psychopath, able to feign emotion and ethical decision making while, behind the scenes, only following a set of algorithmic rules and feeling nothing for the people it claims to help?
What concerns me is that, in any situation where a human makes consequential decisions and for which there exists Big Data, AI has the potential to make the decisions for us. And it seems that technocrats want us to buy into that as some kind of utopian fantasy. AI is dystopian, and were are merely witnessing the opening chapters of its widening and strengthening grip over our world.
If there is any antidote to AI’s influence, it may be to resist playing by its rules. That means choosing to disconnect from Big Data, the set of data points that AI uses for decision making, to whatever extent you deem possible and practical. One example might be to disable Location Services on your cell phone.
Location Services was a stroke of marketing or copywriting genius. The label implies a helpful guide to provide you location service whenever you might feel lost. The dark side of that is that it’s Big Brother watching your every move 24/7 via satellite.
Another method of resisting AI and the overwhelming pull of the digital world is to stop the scroll. We are, collectively, losing billions of hours of precious attention to feeds of online information. These feeds might as well be morphine drips for the populace. Online news, Big Media, Social Media, they all feed us narratives — shaped by AI — that shape our beliefs, thoughts, and actions. By resisting the siren call of the scroll, we unplug from that feed of machine-curated information and reclaim our attention as our own.
One more practice that I’m fond of when it comes to getting back to the fundamentals of being human is spending time writing with a pen and paper. You can do a lot to become aware of, and refine, your own thoughts when you put them down on a page and not a screen. The awareness that you cultivate will grow, and you’ll find that the digital handcuffs will lose their strength as you become more free in both habit and thought.
I’d like to leave you with hope. That may sound trite after what you’ve just read. And yet, as Voltaire reminded us, “Il faut cultiver notre jardin.” Roughly translated, that means we need to tend to our own gardens. You might be surprised both at how you grow and how that awareness radiates outward as you become more free in thought and action.
All the best,
Jesse
