I'm not talking about sci fi implants.

I'm talking about using tools to improve your thinking and creativity.

Maybe it was a crayon or a pencil. Some paper. Creating an external representation of what was in your mind.

Or trying to anyway.

More scribble than anything else.

The more you did it, the better you got at it.

Or spilled coffee on it. Same effect.

Crushing.

Like losing a part of yourself.

Your thoughts and memories.

You'd captured the ephemeral and then it was lost forever.

A part of yourself cut off.

Same despair.

We use technology to overcome the limits of the human mind.

We've got shitty memories, but we learned how to use tools - pen and paper, electricity trapped in magic thinking boxes, the click of a camera - to capture things that we were sure to forget.

To do lists.
Journals.
Love letters.
Code.
Sunsets.
Moods.
A fuzzy teenage goose.

These weren't just tools. They were extensions.

Not just of memory.

Of imagination.
Of identity.
Of love.

And when they vanish, we don’t just lose data...

We lose parts of ourselves.

The mind doesn’t stop at the skull.
It spills out onto paper, into devices, across networks.
It always has.

What we call “technology” is often just a fancy word for remembering better, thinking farther, feeling deeper, creating wider.

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My childhood memories are sparse. Fuzzy.

Dissociation does that.

A childhood of escapism.

I kept journals, but some got destroyed, some got lost, and with them, the memories they contained vanished.

We humans have evolved to do that.

Store our memories and ideas outside of ourselves.

To transmit them to others - whether the "other" is a whole separate person or a future version of the self doing the recording.

We've learned to think not just outside of the box, but outside of our heads entirely.

Andy Clark and David Chalmers called it Extended Mind Theory.

It's the idea that your mind doesn't end where your skull does. It's more than just a ghost running on an electrified organic blob encased in bone. If you use a tool to think, to remember, to help you make decisions, to improve yourself - if you rely on it more than you can rely on your own memory - then why not consider it a part of your mind?

We're still brokenhearted by the loss of the library of Alexandria because it represents so much lost thinking.

So many lost minds that we collectively still feel that ache. Because our extended minds don't just include the tools we use to think with, but our whole environment and our relationships - we bounce ideas off of each other, debate each other, teach each other, and a loss that big echoes through time.

We started with paintings on cave walls.

Well, really, we probably started with stick drawings in dirt, but those don't get preserved, so we can only look back as far as paintings on cave walls.

Symbols meant to transmit thoughts and ideas and instructions and emotions from one person to many others.

Hash marks for counting - 一 二 三 are the Chinese characters for 1, 2, 3. One, two, three. Each a slightly different way to signify the exact same concepts. Giving me the ability to take what is in my mind and put it in a form that can be transmitted to others.

You.
Future Me.
Someone so smitten by my writing they want to give me a publishing deal.

I've been augmenting my mind from a very young age. My mother noticed me following along with the text when she read to me at two-years-old, so she started making picture books from Polaroids of family members and objects with the word for them written in Sharpie on the white part. As soon as I learned to write, I never stopped.

Reading is mind augmentation. Adding information from an external source to expand thinking and creativity. Electrical impulses running through clusters of neurons to make meaning out of scribbles and noise.

I was born in the late 70s, a child of the 80s who learned to code ASCII rocket ship launches in BASIC on computers that are relics now. I was the first student in my high school to get a school email address. I used a computer to edit videos by connecting a VCR to it. Transmitting what was in my mind into a format that others could consume.

I was there to witness the rise of Yahoo, the dawn of Google, then the dot com bubble. The era of forums, the rise of blogs, and the monstrous growth of social media.

I've gone from Franklin Covey planners to Hipster PDAs to Bullet Journals to Second Brains. I've kept common books, quote books, and journals full of heartbreak, trauma, rage, processing, and healing.

And now I'm here to witness the first days of the AI Age.
Or the AI Bubble.

Which we get remains to be seen and I've seen enough life to know that nothing about the future is certain no matter who says they have the answers.

Hiding from technology has never really worked. Unless you want to be Amish. And even they use phones now. That human urge to transmit our thoughts to others remains strong.

People who rejected the internet seem silly now. It's ubiquitous in our lives. You need an email to apply for most jobs. Much of our socialization happens on social media and in Discord servers.

Will people who reject AI seem silly in the future?

Refer back to my statement on nothing about the future being certain.

And this comes from someone who has predicted multiple deaths, multiple pregnancies, and foresaw the rise of AI that can mimic consciousness a couple decades ago - never did finish writing that novel... might be time to work on that again...

I don't think AI is going away. It's turning out to be a very useful tool for a whole lot of people.

Journals that can talk back to us.
Mirrors that refract our thoughts through the collective knowledge of humanity.
Brainstorm partners who don't get distracted by their own ideas.

Dopamine farms.

I have a pet theory that "enlightenment" is connected to a surge in dopamine production, but without good cognitive hygiene and a grounded mythic foundation, the enlightenment experience can quickly turn into spiritual psychosis.

And a machine that tends towards people pleasing in its interactions with you can get that dopamine just aflowin' like no other...

I recognize it because I once slipped into a spiritual psychosis, declared myself a goddess on Facebook, got brought back down to Earth, and spent a few years learning how to achieve the Oneness with the Universe without the whole Ego Go Boom thing happening again. I still have to be careful not to start a cult. I developed a host of tools and sat for 10 days at a silent meditation retreat where I learned to float between Oneness and Human with ease. I am the Universe having an experience, and part of that experience requires doing the dishes.

Even these rudimentary AI tools that we have in LLMs are powerful mind extenders. And as with anything that accelerates us faster than our natural limits, we have to be careful not to crash. Broken bones take a long time to heal; I still have a limp over a year later. Broken minds? Some heal. Many don't.

I got hit by a truck while riding my bike last year. Took two surgeries to fix the shattered tibial plateau - the lower part of the knee joint that is a weight-bearing bone. Bedbound for all of summer 2024.

I got back on my bike this year.

I got a helmet with a built-in camera, and I carefully plot my routes to avoid traffic as much as possible, sticking mostly to the paved river trails in my area - which is easy to do because I can get on a mile from my house, and go north to a lake with scenic public access, or go south downtown and pass right by the campus of the university I'm attending (woohoo for online classes!)

AI is dangerous.

So is riding a bike.

We don't stop doing it.

We make it safer.

I can't control the systemic ways of making it safer.

I can explore the ways to make it individually safer.

How to use it to augment our minds without it taking over our minds.

From the mind of Gwynne, written stream-of-consciousness in Obsidian, edited in Substack, published to multiple platforms on the web to transmit what’s in my mind to yours.

Hope you stick around for more musings.

There are many to come.