About the Now & Up Project
Thoughts experiments from a happy nihilist
Hello and welcome to Now & Up.
I want look at some of the challenges we all face and what we can do to move forward.
What do we already do well? What are some stumbling blocks? What ideas and possible solutions are worth trying?
As part of this journey I’ll dive into philosophy, language and culture, as well as new and evolving forms of intelligence, including AI.
I’ll also look at what other civilisations - past and present - have done and are doing to make life better.
This is a wonderful and strange moment in time
We are self-aware talking monkeys spinning around the globe clutching supercomputers.
But the technology we have created to help us has, in many cases, gone way beyond our ability to comprehend or manage it.
Big tech not-too-subtley manipulates our behaviour.
Machine learning means AI is teaching itself to solve problems, and reach goals, but through looping systems of silicon and software.
It’s an alien intelligence, neither benevolent or benign, but certainly not human.
This means increasingly that the algorithms powering our social media networks are incomprehensible, even to their original developers.
And these algorithms are quite literally influencing the behaviour of billions of humans.
It’s not just our ‘attention’.
Mass food production is now such a complex, mechanised, global enterprise that our involvement is increasingly as specialised cogs in a greater whole.
Most of us could not survive without the seemingly ‘invisible’ technologies that power the modern world and keep us alive.
Yet even with these seemingly god-like technologies we seem to be facing an existential crisis.
A crisis of identity… of meaning… of how to move forward.
Syntax errors everywhere
So many of the topics which we relentlessly self-flagellate over are - I think - syntax errors.
By that I mean situations where we inadvertently (sometimes deliberately) misread or simply because of semantics or linguistic misunderstanding.
Decades of fraught ‘us and them’ narratives in the mainstream media and now social media paint a world where psychopaths lurk on every street corner…
Where no one can be trusted, where it’s every person for themselves.
It doesn’t matter if the crimes we see reflect the behaviour of less than 1% of the population.
If these crimes occupy 90% of news stories and column inches, that’s the space they will occupy in our brains.
A fentanyl strength diet of Social Media outrage has wired us for anxiety, suspicion and hopelessness.
It has also distorted reality.
Our ability to trust, rationalise or empathise has been eroded by the algorithms.
Ideologies are labelled as science. We catastrophise over constructed enemies.
But there is good news. There’s always good news.
Good ideas, first principles thinking and mimicry can be our superpowers
Much of what we fear has no basis in reality.
We often start movements based on intricate, ingenious, but deeply flawed interpretations of so-called ‘foundational’ ideas that we rarely question.
We have a history of doing this. Until recently we had no concept of evolution and believed the world was flat.
We treated headaches by drilling holes in people’s skulls. We delivered babies after dissecting cadavers.
But we learn, over time, from new and better information.
Our greatest strength as a species is our ability to communicate ideas with one another and to mimic.
“This is the best way I’ve found to do this, now you try”
And then we iterate and improve.
It might not seem like it ‘in the moment’ when the world seems like it’s burning, when no ones listening, when humanity seems to be taking a backward step…
But think of what we have done.
We need to embrace the happy accidents
We have effectively created the first machinations of telepathy (the internet connected smartphone in your pocket).
We’ve figured out how to fly. We managed to feed ourselves way beyond (what we thought was) the planet’s capacity. We’ve cured diseases. We’re recoding DNA.
Much of our success is as a result of the happy accident.
We like to think that we set out to discover a thing and then do it but our greatest discoveries are often byproducts.
Penicillin… X-rays… anaesthesia
Our ability to conceptualise and repurpose these happy accidents is something we don’t nurture nearly enough.
We’re attracted to the over confident blaggards who promise - with great and unwavering certainty - that they have the answer.
We dismiss the champions of nuance.
This is about playing in a solution focussed sandbox of ideas
Let’s start from the ground up.
We are all locked, to greater and lesser extents, in our own umwelt.
Understanding this allows us to detach ourselves from the blame game. We can sidestep the ideological introspection and self-flagellating and get on with the business of problem solving.
Nothing is truly knowable so we should test everything.
What works? What doesn’t work? What should we test next?
The hive mind is a wonderful thing. The herd mind needs guardrails.
Nuance is to be celebrated.
There is treasure amidst the chaos.
I hope you enjoy this Substack and I look forward to interacting with you.
Tommy
Now & Up