2019-07-13
Inspired by sci-fi author Charlie Stross’ musing on “slow AI”, I often think about the ways that we might be in the midst of slow singularities at different levels of the stack. And lately, I’ve been rolling around an idea about why the conscious experience of being human seems to be so hard to pin down. We talk a lot about how the complexity of human culture is what separates us from other creatures. But what does that mean? How can we dissect that and look at it like an alien might look at it.
And I wonder if we’d do better to understand our experience of being human as what it’s like to be a cyborg — we’re an organism made of partially biological and partially linguistic structures. What if we should think of language more like a separate living creature that has grown in the fertile environment of our nervous systems. What if we could look at human culture through a much more alien lens. Maybe we could just as easily imagine human culture as language (the creature) terraforming our biology as it’s living symbiotically within our minds. And not only our own biology, but also the ecologies and lower levels in which we exist. And in this way, it’s making a place in which it may flourish — our cities, our conversion of biological and mineral resources, etc.
And if this is the case, we can perhaps imagine our current scenario in a different light. We are maybe on this course where our collective culture is taking us to the edge of a precipice. We are essentially converting the systems on which we depend into fuel for this cultural beast which seems unable to reckon with the reality that it’s dissembling the platform on which it stands. And this reminds me a little bit of a variation of the paperclip maximizer thought experiment. In that version, a poorly calibrated artifical intelligence, in single-minded pursuit of its goals, might convert all available matter into computronium, or programmable matter used for achieving more computation.
Maybe we’re living through a slow singularity. Maybe we are the slow singularity. A biological-memetic singularity. In the same way that you tell someone: “You’re not stuck in the traffic jam; you are the traffic jam.” In this imagining, the memetic creatures of language (which are half of what we are, in a way we perhaps find hard to separate), are dissembling and destabilizing the biological and ecological systems on which they stand, converting all matter to serve the goals of the creatures living in the minds of a single biological host.
It almost sounds like to plot of a sci-fi space opera, but maybe that’s what we’re participating in. We just can’t see how alien we are. But maybe to the rest of the creatures on this earth, we look like some equivalent of unknowable cyborg, operating based on principles and drives and motivations that they cannot experience or understand or keep up with.
(After starting to amateurly work through the concepts around this idea, I came across a niche branche of linguistic called the Leiden theory of language, that has a ton in common. Also, my language likely started to mix with their, and so I am indebted to their years of thoughtful work and rigorous academic pursuit.)