Everything Is F*cked(63)
Basically, there’s been a biological arms race going on since the beginning of forever. This little single-cell thing develops a cool strategy to get more material to replicate itself than do other single-cell organisms, and therefore it wins the resources and reproduces more. Then another little single-cell thing evolves and has an even better strategy for getting food, and it proliferates. This continues, on and on, for billions of years, and pretty soon you have lizards that can camouflage their skin and monkeys that can fake animal sounds and awkward middle-aged divorced men spending all their money on bright red Chevy Camaros even though they can’t really afford them—all because it promotes their survival and ability to reproduce.
This is the story of evolution—survival of the fittest and all that.
But you could also look at it a different way. You could call it “survival of the best information processing.”
Okay, not as catchy, perhaps, but it actually might be more accurate.
See, that amoeba that evolves sensors on its membrane to better detect amino acids—that is, at its core, a form of information processing. It is better able than other organisms to detect the facts of its environment. And because it developed a better way to process information than other blobby cell-like things, it won the evolutionary game and spread its genes.
Similarly, the lizard that can camouflage its skin—that, too, has evolved a way to manipulate visual information to trick predators into ignoring it. Same story with the monkeys faking animal noises. Same deal with the desperate middle-aged dude and his Camaro (or maybe not).
Evolution rewards the most powerful creatures, and power is determined by the ability to access, harness, and manipulate information effectively. A lion can hear its prey over a mile away. A buzzard can see a rat from an altitude of three thousand feet. Whales develop their own personal songs and can communicate up to a hundred miles away from each other while underwater. These are all examples of exceptional information-processing capabilities, and that ability to receive and process information is linked to these creatures’ ability to survive and reproduce.
Physically, humans are pretty unexceptional. We are weak, slow, and frail, and we tire easily.11 But we are nature’s ultimate infor mation processors. We are the only species that can conceptualize the past and future, that can deduce long chains of cause and effect, that can plan and strategize in abstract terms, that can build and create and problem-solve in perpetuity.12 Out of millions of years of evolution, the Thinking Brain (Kant’s sacred conscious mind) is what has, in a few short millennia, dominated the entire planet and called into existence a vast, intricate web of production, technology, and networks.
That’s because we are algorithms. Consciousness itself is a vast network of algorithms and decision trees—algorithms based on values and knowledge and hope.
Our algorithms worked pretty well for the first few hundred thousand years. They worked well on the savannah, when we were hunting bison and living in small nomadic communities and never met more than thirty people in our entire lives.
But in a globally networked economy of billions of people, stocked with thousands of nukes and Facebook privacy violations and holographic Michael Jackson concerts, our algorithms kind of suck. They break down and enter us into ever-escalating cycles of conflict that, by the nature of our algorithms, can produce no permanent satisfaction, no final peace.
It’s like that brutal advice you sometimes hear, that the only thing all your fucked-up relationships have in common is you. Well, the only thing that all the biggest problems in the world have in common is us. Nukes wouldn’t be a problem if there weren’t some dumb fuck sitting there tempted to use them. Biochemical weapons, climate change, endangered species, genocide—you name it, none of it was an issue until we came along.13 Domestic violence, rape, money laundering, fraud—it’s all us.
Life is fundamentally built on algorithms. We just happen to be the most sophisticated and complex algorithms nature has yet produced, the zenith of about one billion years’ worth of evolutionary forces. And now we are on the cusp of producing algorithms that are exponentially better than we are.
Despite all our accomplishments, the human mind is still incredibly flawed. Our ability to process information is hamstrung by our emotional need to validate ourselves. It is curved inward by our perceptual biases. Our Thinking Brain is regularly hijacked and kidnapped by our Feeling Brain’s incessant desires—stuffed in the trunk of the Consciousness Car and often gagged or drugged into incapacitation.
And as we’ve seen, our moral compass too frequently gets swung off course by our inevitable need to generate hope through conflict. As the moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, “morality binds and blinds.”14 Our Feeling Brains are antiquated, outdated software. And while our Thinking Brains are decent, they’re too slow and clunky to be of much use anymore. Just ask Garry Kasparov.
We are a self-hating, self-destructive species.15 That is not a moral statement; it’s simply a fact. This internal tension we all feel, all the time? That’s what got us here. It’s what got us to this point. It’s our arms race. And we’re about to hand over the evolutionary baton to the defining information processors of the next epoch: the machines.
When Elon Musk was asked what the most imminent threats to humanity were, he quickly said there were three: first, wide-scale nuclear war; second, climate change—and then, before naming the third, he fell silent. His face became sullen. He looked down, deep in thought. When the interviewer asked him, “What is the third?” He smiled and said, “I just hope the computers decide to be nice to us.”