In Argument: Negentropy
The light of our century grows brighter every day. As Earth temperatures continue growing quickly year by year, we burn more and more fossil fuels to find the same comfort we used to take for granted, worsening a problem we have known about for generations. This brightening light is in fact caused by the burning of greenhouse gases, which trap heat in our atmosphere, increasing temperatures, and as a result we burn more gases to keep us cool and comfortable in the ever-warming days. The few of us who can afford to spend cool nights in heated dwellings and the hot afternoons in cooled offices and houses use ever more of our waking hours staring into a new unnatural light: screens of silicon crystals powered by burnt fossil fuels. We are increasing our use of energy while making slow progress towards a sustainable power supply of solar, wind, geothermal, and nuclear. Instead, we keep relying on the power of coal and oil, which only serves to worsen our problem. Oil and gas cannot be created again, yet we are spending them like they are the solution. The ancient animals that once could form new oil and gas deposits have long since died, and we are left with what we have. Every day we need renewable energy more and more. Humanity has been focused on other things, mostly computers and artificial intelligence, or what we call “information technology”, because of the vast and deep effects these technologies have on energy, work, and knowledge. Information technologies have caused our worldwide supply chains to change the work of humans, creating more demand for human thought, cooperation, and the kind of creativity that is still uniquely human.
However, with the introduction of new “generative” A.I. systems, we have passed a critical point and entered a new era. Much like in the early eons of life, there is a Cambrian Explosion, now though instead of new species evolving, we have an evolution of thought. Every day, new cultural ideas, memes, and words are created and in each of us grows a greater hunger for new information. When our bodies grow bigger, we feel hungrier and want to eat more food, and when we have more food, we can eat more and grow bigger. Similarly, when our brains grow, we hunger for more information, and now that we have plenty of information available, our brains want it to grow. However, we are coming to realize that much of the new information that has appeared on the new and fascinating internet is like poison to our bodies. As the internet has grown, so has our appetite, but we must start to become aware that we cannot eat only milkshakes and ice-cream, no matter how good they taste. I call on whoever is reading to think for a moment, are the companies that serve you your information diet trying to help you, or exploit your brain the same way previous generations of powerful executives warped our earth? My goal in this essay is to explore how vulnerable we are in this new information environment, how individuals can navigate this landscape, and how out of the chaos new order can be formed.
In Argument: Revolution
If you were to collect the shared knowledge of every person alive today, and compare it to a thousand, a hundred, or even ten years ago, you will be amazed as to how much we have learned in just a few generations. Our shared knowledge used to be just libraries in universities and popular books, yet today we have personal computers, corporate servers and data centers, generative artificial intelligence, and all the humans who use and add to these online libraries. This is an incredible change, this is not the printing press, this is bigger than just a new way of spreading ideas, it is hard to begin to even believe how this technology changes more than anything.
Take out a calculator (most likely on your cellphone) and type some numbers in. Maybe multiply your yearly salary by the years until your retirement, or your hourly wage by the hours you work in a week. How long did this take? Three seconds, maybe five? One hundred years ago, the best computers in the world were people, and they had you beat by approximately ten times your calculation speed. The computer that you pulled out of your pocket would beat you by ten too… just ten followed by ten zeroes.
Sometimes, a computer is just 10,000,000,000 times faster than you and there’s nothing that can change that. When it comes to calculation our computers do more than decimate us. They atomize us.
It would perhaps be best to think of the world in terms of spheres, as the prescientific alchemists did. Imagine that layered on top of the tectonic plates that lie atop the burning magma core of our earth and within the atmosphere and the oceans, there’s another world made of plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, humans, and anything else that lives. These are the “Geosphere” and the “Biosphere”. The Geosphere is the sum of the incredible conditions that allow for life to form: our oceans, tectonic plates, and the magma core. The “Biosphere” is the conditions of life that emerged from the “Geosphere”, which allowed for humans to become sentient. It includes both the microscopic bacteria and the biomes which cover thousands of square miles. These are both highly complex layers within a natural order that emerged out of the cosmic laws of physics and the divine canvas of chemistry. However, looking beyond these layers, we can prophesize another level emerging, still beholden these material laws but built atop our minds. The internet demonstrates mastery: of physics, chemistry, and society, and it has emerged as a place where ideas become the new animals, competing for attention, impact, and immortality.
In the eight decades since the initial vision of this “Noosphere”, the internet emerged as an ocean of ideas, biomes forming on webpages and ideas evolving and growing like tiny creatures in an ancient ocean. The “Noosphere” has begun to break down many of the hardest barriers that language and culture blocked, and that public education had yet to soothe. The ever-connected internet allows for a kind of multi-minded thought to happen across unbelievable distances. Conversations that used to only happen in small rooms between close friends on personal, scientific, or political topics are now publicly available to those on the internet.
The result is a new class of humans emerging, a gap widening evermore between the owners and the users of this network. Companies like Facebook, Google, X, Amazon, or Tencent can access huge amounts of intelligence at a moment’s notice, and with access to this information, inequality has begun to emerge, akin to the periods of history following both the invention of the printing press and deep-sea navigation. It seems a fatal error to me that the division between the owners and the user in the internet might degenerate into a confusing oppression that will not be understood for years to come.
Whether or not this comes to pass, I urge you to consider how the information you read or consume is made and ran by a new type of human that we do not know as well as the simple capitalists that came before them. The foundations of culture have been fundamentally changed by the power of data, and we are locked into this brave new world. This is not a cause for the young to mourn over, as the youth do not have time to mourn this lest they be consumed. It is important for parents and children alike to know that the division and sale of their souls is a near inevitability, and that only through bold and faithful navigation can these new waters be calmed.