Below is a 280+ character tweet about my position on human connection in society today. I hope you enjoy it.
Why is society so disconnected?
In earlier times, our "thing" used to be survival.
Surviving meant working with your family and neighbors to eat, drink, and have a place to sleep.
Today, our "thing" is building companies.
Building companies means working alongside others with specialized knowledge to contribute value to a complex scaffolding of dependencies that keep society afloat, so we can enjoy a life that doesn't require us to worry about lower-level needs.
Do you know what's similar about both of these? Work. We have always spent most of our lives working. Once working for survival. Now working in a specialized role to produce a good or service.
The beautiful part about working for survival is that any tribe could reasonably survive. We can all do the skills needed (kill, cook, gather, etc.), and families/neighbors can work together under “the thing” of survival. It’s not as if your brother can’t possibly learn the skills needed to kill a deer, and so he’d have to get “fired” from the tribe. It’s intuitive and necessary; otherwise, you die, which we are hard programmed to not want to have happen to us. In these circumstances, we enjoyed deeply intertwined lives with our loved ones as it was required for survival. Low standards of living, but we had each other.
In modern times, the circumstances have changed. We're no longer trying to get by; we're continuing to build up that scaffolding of dependencies. This requires skills that we must spend a lot of time building to continue the journey toward progress. Consequently, our community has morphed from “the tribe” into “the company.” Again, most of our lives are spent working. And unfortunately, if you can no longer contribute value to the company, you’re fired. Adding to the scaffolding can only happen when value is created for others, and capitalism ensures this via free-market competition. The company is the successor to the tribe, but sadly, a company can never give you the social benefits of the tribe because of your necessary expendability.
The result?
We don’t need our family and neighbors to survive, and they don’t need us. We need the scaffolding of goods and services the market serves us. Deep human connection comes from the interdependence of the former, not as much the latter.
We've made the ultimate Faustian bargain: trading higher standards of living for human connection.
So this begs the question... how do we enjoy the benefits of high standards of living AND high degrees of connectedness?
I really don't know in the most absolute sense.
Technology is accelerating quickly, causing me to question what it will even mean to be human.
Do we solve human connection by creating AI companions? Do we change the way our brains function to not need this more primitive survival adaptation? Do we build connected communities that are aligned with capitalism? Do we create a new cope (alluding to organized religion)?
Idealistically, I hope we can solve it via the third question. However, I can't shake this:
What's changed now that would allow this to happen that previous circumstances didn't allow? Why didn’t this already happen 10 years ago? 50 years ago? 100 years ago? Why is it suddenly possible in 2023?
While I’m not certain, my belief is that with the capabilities of the internet, and even more so with the advancements in AI, we can solve the problem via connected communities aligned with capitalism.
The fact that I live in San Francisco and feel immediately connected to thousands of strangers is special. We all love to build. That’s our “thing.” The internet acts as our commons to converse and coordinate. And we can do a better job of solving our own problems to build great things for the world. This means that we can build more meaningful communities that serve our goals. For example, so much more can be done in the nebulous phases of our careers where we have no idea what to work on. Most people don’t know how to navigate this.
Eventually, the work part could change too if AI keeps its current pace and commoditizes intelligence–opening up most of our time to a new way of living and thus changing the dynamics of our relationships. What would “the new thing” be that replaces work in this scenario? Who the hell knows. That’s like trying to guess what our lives in capitalism would look like during feudalism. Possible but still theoretical. However, it does seem far more possible that the deep & meaningful parts of human connection can return while still maintaining higher standards of living.
My only counter to this reality creating stronger human connection would be that this is further out than AI girlfriends & perhaps the “Metaverse.” If both of these things reach maturity and strongly satiate human connection, then I’m not sure we’d have the desire to solve a problem we don’t have.
In which case, is this, albeit weird, potential future all that bad? I’m genuinely uncertain.
In my case, I want to live in a world with other humans. I love us, and so I will continue to make progress on Solaris. I believe it’s the only path towards humanity staying at least partly human.