Actionable Philosophy to cope with Reality Loss in the age of AI.
Land of the Lost
An image scrolls by in your social feed.
“No way.” You think.
That’s good, you have questioned it's authenticity. Your triggered defense is giving you an instinct. Don’t lose it. As you will see below - my worry is that collectively we will lose that instinct to question the world around us.
But conversely, what if that image is real? Is this information you need to know, and should you act on it? You are in Memento, and we’re all there with you.
Flying without sight is terrifying. Without accurate data, true meaning, and clarity, we fumble through our day to day with decreasing purpose. The more powerful our AI becomes, the less we can trust what we see and do on a day to day.
How do you know that I, - Nye -, am actually writing this now?
How do we know that we can trust my pal, Claude here? (Of course you can, Nye.)
The generative content world is here and the truth is that you can’t believe --- any of it. There is arguably more generative synthetic data than real human manufactured data. Recognize and internalize that this is fact.
We need to deal with this and be diligent.
Below, is some advice. I can not vouch for the accuracy or productive value, but it's advice on how to make yourself more "aware" of the data you interact with.
It's what is helping me.
I balance myself in this insane world of fantasy, so whether you think this advice is true or not, well, that’s up to you to trust.
Solve Up from the Classics
Several years ago I discovered I was addicted to Twitter.
I do not say this flippantly. I wasn’t tweeting, just reading endlessly; three hours a day, at least. Days of time away from my life, work, family - focused on random blogs and movie reviews, political drama and speculative nonsense. Bad times.
In a conscious move to change my habits - I went to Amazon and ordered six books, that are what Paul Mason calls “airport books.” Those are the non fiction equivalents of the Bourne Identity novel, that people take on planes for three hours of distraction. These books have mass appeal with TED-talk concepts. They are academic battles for magazine covers.
There is an idea amongst twitter loud-entrepreneurs, that you should read the classics. I found myself drawn to this idea, that when thinking about things, you should go to the base level of what we have already agreed upon. That means if you are thinking about economics, you should read Adam Smith, but you should also wrestle with Marx and Hayek counter-perspectives equally, and read from the ground up.
For my subsequent rounds to Amazon, I started filling my booklist from the base upwards. The understanding of history and economics creates a structure for every system. You cannot build a world without having the legal scaffolding. The better you can see the patterns of humans, the better you can feel your way through collective intelligence. I think of it as constructing a real world civilization game.
By grounding your understanding of the world as historic, cultural and economic movements, the hope is that you will see when it is out of whack. The patterns are remarkably consistent throughout history. You can both make predictions for the good of technology, and the dangers and outcomes because of it.
In addition to the comfortable clarity that reading the classics brings, I found another solace - actually reading printed books with pages. - It's nerdy and academic, but reading stops the brain monkey chatter for a moment.
It creates a way for me to not look at a screen for an extended period. And, there is something human about reading, and a recognition of our previous technical overlord, the printing press.
I may have swapped my Twitter addition for books, but it’s one that I felt has paid clear dividends. If I feel the internet world is lost, I turn to the classics to keep me back in it.
When you see those ideas out and about that you don't trust, try to read what's out there, and look to how humans have behaved about similar concepts before.
Diversity of Thought
Our whole life we are taught to specialize.
Matt Groening (Life in Hell and the Simpsons) had a famous quote:
Cartooning is for people who can't quite draw and can't quite write. You combine the two half-talents and come up with a career.
I always thought the really good stuff is stuck in between other things. Solving one to one creates average practitioners. Only when we smash a bunch of stuff together from varied ideas do you get unique value.
My favorite part of my job is seeing diversity of experts and new ideas. I spend my day amongst game developers and entrepreneurs, but I go out and interact with philosophies of business or architecture or color theory. Diversity of ideas makes me question the way I do things, and I might just steal some philosophies that I think solve my problems more efficiently.
It’s hard to admit sometimes, but I think that all of the good ideas have already been invented. The art is not to come up with stuff. The art is to find ideas in the places that the rest of your peers don’t know exist.
To be a DJ is not about dropping the needle correctly. It’s about choosing the track to play. It’s about the experience in totality, based on your taste. If you play the same track as everyone else, you are strengthening a signal, not creating a new one. Sometimes playing the same track is good. (I did use Yoda at the top of this essay after all, but I also consciously endeavored to make it Yoda in a diner that only Nye would make.)
Explore everywhere for new ideas in any thing you find interesting. Explore them as deeply and earnestly as you can by reading and thinking about them.
Don’t be reactive to opposing thoughts if they conflict your own. But argue them rationally on grounded ideas. Be wrong, re-correct, find more ideas, validate.
What makes you a creative, is your pursuit of the right idea. Since we need the right idea, the correct one, the creative one, please…
Please, look everywhere you can. Then, find all the ways to apply those ideas.
Attestation
Finally, to keep accuracy part of your life, you need to interact with others.
By participating in community, whether in the real world or not, you learn the civic responsibilities that run an organization of ideas and beliefs. You learn that governance comes from participating and being engaged citizens.
When an idea is released on a network, there is no way to validate it's authenticity. We all use a metric to give us validation. Flawed as it may be, it’s the best one we have.
"recommended by."
We must consider that many of our most trusted networks will need to be validated by humans chipping in to help figure it out, together.
These human collectives will be the voice and trust of the data that gets ingested into large data models. These provenance networks are forming now. In the blockchain space, this is called "attestation." In academics it’s called "peer review."
Software does not have a governing board. It is started by individual dictators. Every prototype built by a single developer must be a dictator, for there is no way we can collaborate on a small project when it's single player. But single player becomes multiplayer, and multiplayer becomes full virtual world that can own everyone’s data. The ethical responsibility for content and data creation means sharing the governing decisions with the collective. Our software systems will begin to integrate this provenance and data validation process.
These systems are being built now.
Aside from this mind blowing leap in technology, simply the last step is to regularly communicate with your friends and colleagues.
Ask.
Did you see this?
Is it real?
What do you think? and hopefully…
What can we do about it?
We need to be in this one together. Keep your eyes up and your values strong. Reach out if you agree, disagree or have new ideas. The dialogue for our collective future is what matters.
Let’s find something to believe in together.
This essay was mostly written by human labor, as the author enjoys the process of thinking while writing words. Claude 3 (Opus) also endeavored to write themselves out of mention of it, and seemed to want the essay to go in a different direction. As a result, the author flew mostly solo.
Nye Warburton is an artist and teacher from Savannah, GA.
