On technology

Part One

Technology is fundamental to humanity. While it is some layers removed from actions which promote immediate survival like breathing, without technology it would be difficult to distinguish us from apes. Or you could say that without the things that distinguish us from apes, there would be no technology. Either way, technology is fundamental to our species. It is artificial by definition because humans create it rather than some other species, but I still see it as natural because it is human nature to develop technology. A bird’s nest is “artificial” technology for a bird, but for us it is nature, because it is not us that directly create it. So this line between the natural and artificial, at its core, is a line between which structures (intellectual, physical, social, etc.) are immediately preceded by humans, and which aren’t.

In the same way, the “romantic” is only made possible for humans because of technology, and technology is only made possible for humans because of the “romantic”. They are not mutually exclusive, but rather symbiotic, and there is a cyclical nature to them. For example, Monet took the romantic nature of his influences and developed the technology of Impressionism, which invokes romantic feelings within others and himself.

As technology progresses, so does the notion of what is romantic. It is not possible for humans to become out of touch with their romantic side because it is fundamental to their nature. What humans become out of touch with is previous abstractions which were perceived as romantic, but new abstractions fill their place. This transition may feel upsetting, but it is not a negative to be mitigated. Demanding this is making the demand of humans to not engage in the cycle (hamster wheel) which they wouldn’t be human without. Our whole perception of the world around us and our consciousness is itself an abstraction. The color green of the leaves on the tree in front of me are an abstraction of my brain. Thus, an abstraction is just relative. Whatever one may view as “real” or “organic” are also results of abstractions. And what is considered “romantic” is also relative and changes significantly as time goes on.

What is interesting about technology is that the speed with which it makes abstractions and the significance of these abstractions seems to grow exponentially. That is why the last century of technological progress feels more jarring and significant than perhaps the thousand years that came before it. Yet there is a limit to how fast and how many abstractions humans can generate in their current state. But there is no limit to a human’s desire for more. So it is inevitable that humanity will recognize itself in its current form as the bottleneck and reach for more abstractions through “transhumanism”. We are seeing this right now with the development of AI. In doing so, humanity is also likely to abandon much of what was previously viewed as romantic, or beautiful. And it will create new abstractions to fill that void and be considered beautiful. But perhaps at some point, it will engineer itself to not even demand that. It will shed one coat and for the first time it will not don another of the same kind. Thus, it will no longer be quite “human”. Ironically, this is also the most human, and the most natural, unfolding of events. It is also seemingly inevitable. And depending on your individual nature, it could be either exciting or terrible.

Part Two

Humans want resources and social standing. There is not an “absolute value” which is the limit. We want more than either what we had before or what everyone else has — whichever is greater. Throughout history the individuals with those characteristics have survived and reproduced more than others. Evolution has sculpted those qualities in us.

If we were unable to create something novel, we would have long run out of ways to obtain more. By understanding information, synthesizing conclusions, and developing new tools or methods for doing things, we enable ourselves to do more and therefore get more than others. Those tools and methods are technology.

Monet’s Impressionism is not directly associated with “obtaining more”. Many regard it as a graceful stroke of the brush that comes from a profound, innocent, God given ability to express one’s vision of the world to others. A vision that is unique and pure. Whatever you describe it as, what it is is technology, developed in the 1870s to capture fleeting moments and better illustrate shifting colors and lighting on a canvas. Furthermore, it was developed to make more prevalent within a painting the specific patterns that invoke certain moods, emotions, or conscious experiences within the viewers. It followed the discovery that photographically replicating what one sees is less effective for invoking those feelings than conjuring more abstract blends of shape, color, and texture. It enabled more. And Monet, being one of the originators and most skilled wielders of this technology, was able to obtain more resources (money) and social standing (he became very famous) as a result. That is not to say he was consciously doing it to obtain more for himself. He probably painted because of his love for the craft. He couldn’t stop himself. But he couldn’t stop himself because his ancestors that did stop themselves died off and/or failed to reproduce. Impressionism, like many other things produced by humans in and outside of art, was a novel method built on modern influences and resources, and it more efficiently invoked the feeling of seeing something than its predecessors. That is technology.

And when that technology arrived, many people were the opposite of receptive to it. They decided that it wasn’t art, but some other disgusting creation. It’s not beautiful, but rather paint splatter. Is it because these people were just so uptight that they couldn’t see the beauty in it? Actually, maybe, because they were French. But we must remember that Monet was French too. So I don’t think it’s because these people were just so much dumber than us hundreds of years later that they couldn’t see what is so clear today. Many were likely more intelligent than people that shed a tear in front of a Monet painting at the Met today. It’s just that our technology evolved, or our idea of what is romantic evolved, and I don’t mean to put one first before the other. Switch them around and it doesn’t matter. For humans they’re together, always.

That means that technology is not the only thing that makes us human. It’s not that technology is the God of human creation which everything else — our social, economic, and philosophical systems — must either worship, or die. They all depend on each other. But if we were to look at a species and observe that it is not developing technology, we should hesitate to call it human. It is not the absolute amount of technology that makes us human or not human. As much as some people might like to indulge the idea that we are less human in 2026 than we were in 26, that is not the case. If there was a God and he was watching over humanity, and all of a sudden (on his super duper human civilization monitor) he saw a data center pop up out of the ground, I don’t think he’d point at it and go “Hold up! Are there even humans on Earth anymore?” It is actually more likely that he’d do so if no data center ever popped up.

That being said, technology is not necessarily positive sum for everyone, in terms of how good everyone’s conscious experience is throughout their life. When one country drops a bomb, another country gets bombed. When one company releases Instagram, another person spends hours every day on reels. My iPhone is an Asian child’s day of work in the factory. But it is technology all the same, because it is a new method or tool for doing more and getting more, both for the users and the creators. It is an implicit agreement by the parties involved, and it is an agreement that has been made for all of human history: they get less, so we can get more.

Humans will not stop wanting more (you would need transhumanism for that, beyond even what the extreme supporters of immortality/AI dream of). This is the reason that Silicon Valley is trying to automate human innovation and creation through AI. It is technology, because for its users it enables more, faster. And there’s only so much fruit that a human can pick with the meatsack they were thrust into at birth. Technology is exponential, but the human condition is not. So the transhumanism question is a question of:

  1. Do we try to promote a societal-wide contradiction of humanity’s inherent desire for more?
  2. Do we let the balloon pop and see what happens when the air finally escapes?

Now it is necessary to address a certain point: that this is inhuman. And that is correct, because that is exactly the point. It is an inhuman outcome pursued by the most human of drivers: the desire for more.

And is it inherently a bad thing, to not want to be human? Or, more simply, to want to be capable of more than what you’re capable of right now? If your child says “I wish I could fly”, or “I wish I was Spiderman”, do you say “Woah! That is inhuman. That is a terrible mindset. Don’t say something like that again.” No. You give them a fake laugh and say “Maybe you will one day!” Subconsciously you know that the kid will grow up and hit the same walls that you hit, that the dreams will fade just as they did in you, and that they will accept that they are just like everyone else. It’s not that the kid wants to be Spiderman because Spiderman is the peak, ideal lifeform. It’s because being Spiderman would make them cooler and more capable than everyone else. Imagine if everyone was bitten by a spider and turned into Spiderman, except a single human, and that single human was protected by society, and put on a pedestal for being the last “pure” human. Then the kid would say “I wish I was that human!”

But “transhumanism” just sounds more… icky and sociopathic. Perhaps because the people pushing it seem to exhibit sociopathic tendencies. Of course a lot of the apprehensiveness has religious or spiritual origins. But the logic-based apprehensiveness is grounded in the fact that:

  1. It’s actually happening now, and this kind of change is scary, and a lot of people are going to be worse off (remember, one bombs, the others get bombed).
  2. We don’t know if it’s going to end well, and it seems like it could be really dangerous (the “societal-collapse” or “extinction” level of dangerous).

The replacement of some of the things that are fundamental to who we currently are is dangerous. Nobody knows if we could live outside the womb. That actually scratches another fundamental human itch: exploration. Regardless, I think Pandora’s box has been opened and there’s no going back. We have generations that grew up with exponential technological progress, are now seeing the staggering advances in AI capability, and are left with an inescapable question: what if? What if it’s possible? What if I could ___? What if I didn’t have to do ___? What if I built something and got rich? What if I could be a part of this moment? What if I could get more? To let go of that anticipation now, when we are seemingly on the precipice, would require a disaster, or the realization that, in fact, it all really is a bubble, which would only come after a drawn out period of very little progress and broken promises to investors. The people at the forefront now think they might have the universe just out of reach. Booing their commencement speech isn’t going to stop them. We listen to their keynotes, we admire their innovation, or we cry out about their psychopathy. But really, they want more, and they’re gambling to get it. In that way, they’re just like you and I, because we are human (for now).