Between the Falls

(This is the transcript of a talk I recorded this morning. I’ll make the video available as soon as possible, but subscribers get the text from it today. I don’t want to give too much away, but there will be talk of pleasure giving apps, giant earth movers, Mallomars, and god-like powers of creation. I ask the question, Is it moral to transform yourself into something your present self would find abhorrent, but your future self might be fully comfortable with?)

In the summer of 2009, long before moving to this city, I sat in the corner of this restaurant. Back then it was different cafe, honestly a better one, and I looked out the window while enjoying a cappuccino and a brie sandwich. When I got back home to Toronto, I was trying to describe that moment to someone, and I wondered if I could find the cafe on Google’s new street view map feature. I couldn’t recall exactly where it was, but after virtually walking around near my hotel for a bit, I spotted it. In the street view image, someone else was in the corner, sitting exactly where I had been, face blurred.

The ability to re-find the exact location where I had been in a city, and to show that place to someone else, even though I hadn’t taken any photos of it myself, felt like a huge change. Fifteen years later it’s normal, everyday magic. Human beings gained what could legitimately be seen as a collective superpower, and once we had it, that quickly became part of what it meant to be a human being of today. A human being is a bipedal mammal who can digitally traverse most of the world’s streets in whatever random way they want.

That definition may seem silly, or facetious, but I don’t think it is. Species are differentiated as much by what they do as their morphology. We have both groundhogs and beavers at our family cottage in Ontario, and I can assure you, they don’t really look all that different, especially from a distance. But one will dig up your yard, and the other will turn vast swaths of your property into mosquito infested wetlands, if you let it. What makes a beaver a beaver and not a ground hog isn’t so much the longer front teeth and flatter tail, it’s the dams and lodges and the decimated trees. Likewise, what makes a human being a human being and not a chimpanzee isn’t our relative lack of body hair (at least, among non-Italians), it’s that we dominate the earth, and make movies about alternative earths run by simians. Chimps, chimps don’t make those kinds of movies.

Darwin’s theory of evolution is interesting, but the biological origin story of human beings in particular, isn’t. Our brains got bigger, our backs got straighter, our jaws got weaker. The much more interesting stories about human beings 1.0 come from religion and mythology. You already know the most famous one, and will recognize it immediately.

Two innocent lovers. Frolicking in a paradise, naked and not really any different from the other beasts of the forest. Along comes a snake, tempts the temptress, she tempts the guy, they bite into the fruit of the one tree God told them not to eat from, and now all of a sudden they can see. They see morality. And shame. Innocence is lost. Paradise paved over with a shitty layer of asphalt that needs to be patched every two years.

That bite delivered us out of paradise into sin. Everyone talks about what it cost us. But, what did we gain?

The story of the first great fall of man is really the story of us becoming mankind. No apple bite, no self-awareness. No clothes. No good or evil. No planning. No civilization. No mass produced mallomars cookies.

What human beings got, along with self-awareness, was the ability to abstract and reframe reality. That’s been an insanely powerful tool for us, and not just in science. It allows us to push out our time preferences, as we deliberately re-map inherently unpleasant experiences like going for a run or lifting weights or studying calculus. We can re-frame these as life-enhancing activities that we tolerate, or even enjoy, sometimes right now. That first bite brought us closer to god, and we’ve used those god-like powers to remake every aspect of our environment. And, I should note, there are lots of good arguments against global warming alarmism, but saying that human beings aren’t powerful enough to drastically alter our environment is just silly. Those beavers I mentioned drastically alter their environments, and they don’t even have Takraf Baggers.

My central thesis, the basis for this talk, or sermon if you will, and the ones to follow, is that humans are now poised on the brink of our second great fall. We are defined by, and co-evolving with, our tools, and with sufficient enhancements to those tools, along with sufficient merging of those tools and our own bodies, we are becoming a new species, some realized version of what New Age weirdo Yatri called “Unknown Man” back in the 80s, which in my opinion is an important time of inflection in the story of the second great fall.

If the bite of that biblical apple marked the dawn of the era of humans as we’ve known them up until today, we are now at the sunset of that era. At the edge of a fall that will transform us just as profoundly as the last one, but we can see this one coming.

In this next great fall, we’ll gain god-like powers over the human body and it’s perception of the world, and over creation itself. Google’s Streetview is an important part of that transformation, or at the very least a mile marker along that road, but to mix my metaphors, it’s also just one piece of the puzzle, one apple in the basket. Look at the full bundle of tools we’re perfecting right now and consider the common through-lines. We’re progressing rapidly on artificial intelligence, gene editing, Neuralink-style brain connections, life extension technology, and realistic virtual worlds, and AR overlays.

What will we gain from this next big bite of the apple? Once fully chewed and digested, we will emerge with the god-like powers to directly create new (or revived) forms of life, the ability to indefinitely extend our own lives, artificial intelligence that can be harnessed to vastly expand our intellectual and creative talents. We will also have and the ability to take god-like control over our fellow humans. To give just one concrete example, we are less than a decade away from the first dog owner who implants a chip in his puppy’s head that can deliver pleasure or pain with the click of a remote, or most likely a swipe left or right within a mobile app. Within another ten years after that, parents will be wonder how anyone trained their children before the era of implants.

In this next great fall, we radically reduce the gap in power between us, and whatever force created our universe, or simulation. In Fall One we gained the filter of self-awareness, like our creator. After Fall Two, we are the creator. Once this fall has played out, we will no longer be humans in any way we might recognize today.

I’m going to repeat that, because it’s easy to say but very hard to process, especially with our highly limited, non-networked, non-enhanced version 1.0 brains. So to say again, after fall number two, humans will no longer be humans in a way that most humans from history would have recognized. As a thought experiment, let’s go back in time to our favorite ancient philosophers, the Greeks, and snap up a random guy in a toga, then transport him forward to the US in the early 80s, right at the dawn of the home computing revolution. So much would amaze him about that world! The scale of industrial production. The amazing modes of transportation. The huge variety of shops and the products in them. The music coming magically out of speakers in this shops. The colorful clothing.

So much would be different, and yet 1980’s humans would still be highly intelligible to toga guy. He would see them wake up, eat breakfast with eggs and a glass of milk, then many of those 80s humans would go do work that involves physical labor, or some kind or shopkeeping. He would see them walk around, have conversations, and gather together to drink alcoholic beverages. Yes, 80’s humans spend a lot of time staring at screens with moving pictures in their homes, but otherwise human life, and human beings, would still be comprehensible, just with much more tools, including that one with the screen that’s about to change everything.

The culture of 1980 would be, of course, very different from ancient Greece, but the institutions and human behaviors would be largely comprehensible. Toga guy would see people gathering in houses of worship, attending massive sporting events, getting married and making babies the traditional way and raising them and sending them off to a school to be lectured by another human being at the front of a classroom. Toga guy would see parades, funerals, political rallies, and debates in a congress. The topics of conversation, once he figured out the language, would be largely familiar as well: work, kids, sports, politics, war, food, relationships and entertainment, though most of the entertainment discussion would center around what people saw happening on those screens. The US in 1980 would be a highly disorienting place for toga guy, but if he was brought back to ancient Greece to tell the tale, he would describe a world of humans doing human things in human ways.

My argument is that if you transported Toga guy forward to today, and much more so if you transport him to a first-world country in another 20 years from now, almost everything about human beings and how they live will be incomprehensible. Nearly every interaction with the physical world will be virtualized, or mediated by technology. Conversations will happen inaudibly and over great distances, essentially like telepathy, which we almost have today with cellphone. We will be in constant sublingual conversation with others and with AI’s to guide and inform us, and these conversations will be invisible to toga man. Our vehicles will drive themselves, and we will have on some kind of AR glasses or ocular implants that work all the time. Most of our jobs will bear no relationship to anything toga man can recognize. He will see people on treadmills, wearing strange full body suits, gesturing their hands like a symphony conductor to an audience of nobody. Lots of people will spend large parts of their day looking like this.

Almost nothing about what we do in 20 years will make sense to Toga guy. Back to the now, this particular moment as I make notes for the talk I’ll be recording later, I still have one foot in the old human world. Looking up and around my laptop screen at the restaurant I’m in, I see mostly the old human way of being. There’s a real wax candle burning in a real glass on my real wood laminate tabletop. There’s a bookshelf in the corner with bound volumes and empty wine bottles. In front of me, a German couple is sipping coffee and occasionally glancing at their smartwatches. Eavesdropping for a moment, I wonder if they are talking about that insanely viral German language Tik Tok about the woman who sells rhubarb pie to barbarians. All German speaking sounds like that song to me right now.

I like the old world. I like a lot about the old way of being, though my concept of the old way of being includes the giant metal coffee machine that prepared the cappuccino I’m sipping on right now. Which is a subtle way of saying the old world is already dead, in the sense that Agent Smith in The Matrix tells the lieutenant that his men are already dead when he finds out they’ve entered a building with Morpheus and Neo.

Can we hone in on that “already dead” moment, beyond saying it was a decades long transition that began with computers in every home and will end with a chip in every brain? I think so. I think we can. The key moment came in 2016. Now as soon as I say that particular year certain associations might come into your head, but the one I’m thinking off, the seemingly little thing that happened which singled the end of an era, was the removal of the headphone jack from Apple’s iPhone. It was one of those decisions that appeared to come out of nowhere, with no real logic behind it. Who wanted that? The official reason was to save space, but this was at the beginning of a time when iPhone displays went from about 4.5” to 6”, and Apple’s biggest competitor, Samsung, found a way to integrate an entire removable stylus into many of their models, so I don’t buy that explanation. Nor do I think this was just a money grab, as in a way to force everyone in the Apple ecosystem to buy an adaptor dongle or new headphones.

I think the real reason is even more evil, and the removal of the headphone jack was the beginning of the period of malevolent, anti-human design we find ourselves in right now. The headphone jack disappeared because it belonged to a losing paradigm of tech, one in which users were still in control of the physical ecosystems of their devices, even if they had already ceded software environments to manufacturers. It’s a world in which user-controlled physical connections still existed, and hadn’t yet been fully replaced by the invisible and controlled world of bluetooth. Almost everyone in the market for an iPhone in 2016 had multiple wired headphones lying around, which they used to hook up to other phones, iPads, mp3 players, Walkmans, or home stereos. Any one of these headphones worked with any device, just plug it in and listen, though recording with them could be more complicated. The removal of the iPhone jack was an act of deliberate immiseration, one that still frustrates millions of us on a regular basis, myself included, eight years later. People who would still prefer to control our own hardware environments, to use the accessories we want, whenever we want, with plugs we control, we are being starved out, like castle dwellers under siege, who must eventually surrender and accept our new role as servants to wireless devices that need daily charging and periodic debugging.

Am I being too extreme about this single decision? I don’t think so. It was a turning point, the first major act of weaponizing a popular device’s ecosystem against its users. If Apple’s famous 1984 commercial about rebelling against the machine setup a condition that The Clash explained best with their wonderful line, “He who fucks nuns, will later join the church,” then 2016 was the year Apple unambiguously announced their intention to pivot. We will control your environment, and you will hate it and grumble and buy a dozen of our fragile and easily lost $10 adaptors before you give up and spend $200 on white AirPods and walk around like a cyborg advertising our product, and this will make us smile. 2016 was the beginning of effort to get us to swallow the bitter, cyanide filled seeds at Apple’s core.

So, why not just opt-out of Apple, though? Bite into a Blackberry instead? As maybe you’ll recall, shortly after Apple pulled the plug on its headphone jack, so too did a number of other major phone manufacturers. And switching software ecosystems isn’t so easy. Nor is it realistic to expect that we would opt out of cell phones for music entirely, and go back to mp3 players or Walkmans or even try walking around and listen to the sounds of our actual environment.

That’s a tiny version of a much bigger issue with opting out of new technologies, and I’ll have lots more to say about that question in future talks. But in general, and this should be clear to anyone who’s become addicted to a new mobile app, this is like expecting humans, collectively, to refuse to bite into an apple that’s a million times more juicy and tempting than the one Eve handed to Adam. Saying No to such a temptation just doesn’t seem like it’s in our natures as Human Beings 1.0, which is to say, the same humans who bit into that first juicy apple.

At the same time, as Human Beings 1.0, our eyes are opened to moral issues. We have, I believe, a built-in spiritual aversion to certain technological advances, like genetic engineering to create hybrid creatures, including human-machine cyborgs. The uncanny valley, that sense of disturbance we feel when presented with something that is human-like, but not quite human, is a universal feeling, at least in the West. If we see the road that certain trends are leading us down, and we decide it’s a highway to hell, and maybe we can have some level of where that road goes. Or take an exit ramp. Maybe.

There’s no shortage of blogs and podcasts and news sites that detail the technical side of this road towards a cybernetic, trans-human future. What I’m attempting to do with this series is something different. There will be some discussion of the details of those technologies, but what I really want to focus on is the moral, or spiritual, side of the the journey. Next week I’ll be taking seriously an idea of my very first podcast guest, Vin Armani, aka the Cyprian, who believes that to use generative AI tool like ChatGPT is to, literally, summon demons. Is he right? What would it mean if he is, or could be?

I’ll take seriously the idea of “moral injury”, a recent term for a very old concept that was once a major driver of human behavior, back when spiritual integrity was a thing people strived for, and not a wholly performative act in its secularized version. According to the story in Genesis, that first great fall was the original sin, as in a moral lapse, or spiritual transgression. To me that first bite of the apple looks like a win, and is the basis for all that is amazing about our human dominated world. But then, I’m judging it from the context of the already fallen.

This is the central dilemma in judging the moral implications of this next great fall, and will be a big focus for me. It’s a version of what economists call a wicked problem, which they don’t mean in an individual, spiritual way, but I do. My previous podcast guest Russ Roberts does a good job explaining these dilemmas at a personal level in a book called “Wild Problems”. He gives the example of someone deciding whether or not they should become a vampire. Such a, presumably irreversible, transition has to be judged now, as a human, but it will be experienced, later, as a vampire. Is it moral to live off the flesh of humans? That seems like an abomination to me, but I’m not a vampire. If I was, would I feel differently? Is it moral to transform yourself into something your present self would find abhorrent, but your future self might be fully comfortable with?

Because our transformation into Human Beings 2.0 is connected to the digital enhancement of our current world and the way we perceive it, I’ll spend time talking about the idea that we already live in a simulated universe. What would that mean for us as we begin to build our own simulations? Does it change the moral calculus if our next great fall is actually just one step deeper into an inception like dream world? Or could our VR headsets actually give us a more accurate view into the true workings of our universe.

For certain in one of these talks I’l be discussing an experiment I did to determine whether we live in a synthetic world, specifically one that has aspects of the Truman Show. And not to give too much away, but I found the result of that experiment deeply unsettling, especially given how carefully I set it up, and for those of you who aren’t familiar with me as a person, I have a background in stats and probability, and have spoken extensively about a couple other topics that are tied into this next great Fall. One is the connection between probability and morality. The other is about the end of causality as the engine for scientific progress, and how our future, if we continue down this path, is in the ascendance of black box models, ones so complex you can no longer tease any meaningful intuition out of them. I’ll talk about the connection between this next great fall and our transition into what’s astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev a Type 2 civilization, one capable of completely destroying itself in a short period of time. And I’ll make the case that, paradoxically, the only way for us to change the future may be to accept our lack of free will, or at least recognize the strings pulling at our limbs.

Broadly speaking, there are two answers the question, What are we doing? One is technical, as in, for example, we are creating gene editing tools that will allow us to change our DNA on the fly. As mentioned, that’s not the kind of response I’ll be talking about. I’ll be treating the question in a more meta way, as in, What are we doing, Man? Is that even a good idea? Do we we have to do it, do we have to take that next great fall? Short of catastrophic civilizational collapse, have we already bitten too deeply into the next juicy apple? And if so, how should we prepare ourselves spiritually if the wicked problem of whether to become a vampire has already been decided in the affirmative, and the best we can do is try and influence what kind of vampires we become? Can we transform into the sparkling, freedom loving, animal eating Cullen clan of Twilight, or are we doomed to be more like the darkness dwelling, power hungry, human eating creatures from Blade?

Should you wish to join me on this literal, and spiritual journey, make sure you subscribe to this series of weekly talks about our precarious existence between the falls.