Adam and Eve Were Assholes

The institutions are dead. All of them. Media, academia, the justice system, politics big business, small business, the list goes on and on. Across the board, people have little to no faith in the traditional institutions that make up American civic life, which raises three possibilities: either the institutions hopelessly fucked up or the population is. Or is it both? After all, it’s people who make up the institutions.

Which raises the further question: did we fuck up the institutions, did the institutions fuck us up, and or is there some kind of external factor that’s fucking up everything? Are we in a symbiotic relationship of suck? I think, perhaps, we are.

If I had to lay the blame anywhere, I would point to the invention of the transistor. First invented in 1947 by a team at Bell Labs (although there are earlier antecedents), the transistor grew out of a wartime effort to make better radar receivers. Here’s a replica of the first one:

First transistor: lame

The transistor has, of course, gone through many iterations since then, as materials science has made them better, more powerful, and shrunk them down to the atomic level. Everyday computers now contain billions of transistors, which perform billions of calculations in an eye blink, which give rise to what we think of when we think of “modern technology.” It is the transistor, more than any invention I can think of, (and I can think of as many as FIVE inventions) that has fucked us beyond unfucking.

When it comes to raw computational ability, our brains cannot keep up with the power of even the humblest modern smartphone, nor can we possibly process the torrents of information that besiege us as a result of this computational power. Instantaneous global communication has exposed all of us to different ways of thinking and allowed anybody with access to a phone to inject themselves into any conversation. This has obvious benefits and obvious pitfalls. Unfortunately, the pits have gotten deeper as the technology has progressed.

A perfect example is Sora, Open AI’s newest offering, is an astounding text-to-video AI generator. Sora can take any prompt, say: “movie trailer featuring the adventures of the 30 year old space man wearing a red wool knitted motorcycle helmet, blue sky, salt desert, cinematic style, shot on 35mm film, vivid colors.”

And come up with this:

None of that existed before the prompt. Amazing, right? But what are the implications? Keep in mind, from here on out, that’s the WORST this technology is going to be. And Sora is only one example of the kind of technology we’re going to be dealing with as we continue to rush pell-mell into our insecure future. None of it possible without the humble little transistor.

It is the transistor which created the obscene modern financial markets, whose primary purpose has gone from lending money to build institutions, to figuring out ways to take advantage of micro-fluctuations in global currencies/marketplaces/commodities/whatever for the purpose of making themselves and their clients ever richer, and then using those riches to further invest in ways of capitalizing on their already-considerable advantages.

It is the transistor which has made it possible for a bad actor in one country to poison the well in another country by sowing discord, undermining governments, hacking into infrastructure, etc. A tiny country like North Korea can now sow as much chaos as they choose at cost.

It is the transistor which allows each of us to silo ourselves into our respective information pools. We now have the astounding ability to only receive the information we wish to receive. The obvious result is that we now live in the so-called “fact free” information space, in which we many of us cannot agree on even basic premises: we see it playing out now in the historical revision of January 6^th, an event which most of us witnessed in real time.

And it’s about to get much, much worse.

The transistor does nothing more open or close depending on whether or not an electrical charge is present. It’s a gate. The gate is either open or closed. The system is either/or. From that binary system, we derive all digital computer operations. Quantum computers use a form of transistors which are called qubits. Unlike traditional transistors, the qubit transistor allows the gate to be either open or closed or both at the same time, known as “superposition.” How can something be on and off at the same time? I don’t know. That’s just quantum mechanics. The point is that these new quantum computers will, one day soon, leave traditional computing in the dust. Which is crazy because traditional computing has already left humanity in the dust.

Yes, some good will come out of this. Maybe a lot of good. There will be unbelievable advances as a result. Personalized cancer treatments, new materials, better modeling of our natural world which will, hopefully, help us figure out what to do about climate change. These are just the most obvious examples. Once we marry quantum computing to AI, who knows what the hell will happen?

In a sense, we’ve been done in by math.

People have always had trouble keeping up with the technologies are brains produce. No other creature has this problem. Everything starts off with so much promise and so quickly turns to shit. Remember when the internet was going to enhance peaceful coexistence and democratize the globe? Didn’t happen.

Maybe the gods were right to punish Prometheus for giving fire to humanity. Pandora should have kept that damned box closed. And while we’re at it, Adam and Eve were assholes. We could’ve had a garden y’all.

So, of course our institutions are suffering. Worse, I don’t see how they can hold. What does that mean? I have no idea, other than it’s hard for me to imagine our situation getting much better before getting much worse. I don’t know where any of this is headed. It’s possible that communities will self-organize into smaller groups that rely less on institutions of any kind, which is likely to be the best possible outcome. It’s also unlikely without the population drop predicted to occur over the next hundred years or so. Then again, it’s also possible that we’re already too late, that I’m a frog typing this from my a pot of slowly heating water. I’m typing possible we’re just frogs in slowly heating water. If that’s the case, I don’t see any of us escape getting burnt.