Dissolving the Great Machine: Toward a World of Uselessness
Thoughts on an approaching inflection point in human values
If you are a ‘knowledge worker' you may realize that your knowledge, other than that about business practices unique to your business and only your business, has become practically worthless. Not only to your employer but likely also to your colleagues. A few years ago we would say ‘just Google it', now we say ‘just ask chatgpt’. I would argue that your knowledge was already worthless as the Internet would provide it to practically anyone, it was your ability to synthesize that knowledge which, at least before today, gave you an intellectual leg to stand on. Now that unique capacity for synthesis has also been taken from you, the loss of which has made you equally as valuable as any other worker who can ask pertinent questions and absorb information reliably well - any worker who can act as the hand of this digital organism as well as or better than you.
Where does this leave you? What do you feel like? You are the hand while the mind exists inside the machine, you have become the robot. Robot originating from the Czech ‘robota’, forced servitude. What else is there to take from you? You are becoming more and more useful to the machine that you have been living inside of. That said, you are becoming useless to yourself, to your fellow man. Perhaps we need to redefine uselessness.
With the advent of writing Socrates warned they will “trust the written characters and not themselves”, and we did. But what we gained was immense - the capacity to store knowledge permanently, to outsource the human mind and canonize it. Yes, bad ideas could manifest themselves and spread, but good ideas could do just the same. With this invention we lost our ability to hold novels worth of information in our head but we gained the ability to choose which novel was relevant to the given time, to index our knowledge to that of titles of books rather than their contents and to choose the title we needed when we needed it. For the purposes of remembering and orating large continuous works, we became useless.
Shortly thereafter (roughly speaking) the Internet came about and we soon ran into the same problem on a whole new order of magnitude. If all of the information on earth was available to anyone at any time what madness might ensue! This means anyone could learn how the financial system worked, the political system, they could build a bomb and kill many people or worse, harm someone ‘important’. Still, the good would outweigh the bad right? With this invention we lost our patience to regularly read entire books. The kill chain from thought to action was cut down from hours or days to minutes and thus we had no need for that patience any longer. For the purposes of our capacity to wander through ideas, slowly simmering new thoughts into existence, we became useless.
Then, suddenly we created these god forsaken machines that we cannot stop talking about, and with them we lost our need to synthesize, to even remember the disparate pieces of information that one might use to come to a conclusion. The instant conclusion machine or ICM is what I will call it from here on out. With the ICM we can produce ever more content, generate ever more value, make ever more money. For the purposes of drawing our own individual conclusions we are becoming useless.
With each invention we take a further step away from (god jk) using our mind to store information, and with this we lose the capacity to perform functions that we have come to associate with the act of being human. Perhaps the truly adaptable minds of the future will store no information whatsoever and be permanently wired to our digital pacifier/enabler/controller, allowing them to answer any question and perform any necessary cognitive task instantly. Perhaps, with their capacity for original thought fully lobotomized, they will come to see our need for individual intellectual deduction as needlessly rigorous and banal not unlike how we view Socrates and his insistence on the value of pure memory. But I hope we never reach that point, as I see a great inflection point ahead.
There is an unimaginably brief time before the machine begins to run itself. With humans stepping back from the act of capital creation, the ICM acts as a solvent for the entire system of modern work, dissolving with it our felt need to automechanize. On the other side of this transition, we begin to move in the opposite direction.
The need to maximize our conclusion output removed, we are given the time to think about each individual conclusion we draw. The need to harvest vast amounts of information under tight timelines removed, we can explore the vast planes of thought with attention and wonder. The need to be a master of all removed, we can return to truly deep mastery of what matters most to us. What will you do in a world that promotes rather than obstructs the possibility of human flourishing? In a time of deep cultural nihilism I hope you will join me in believing that there is a world worth looking forward to - even if it can at times seem so far away.