#112 | SingerGPT
Living for the sake of living, not for the sake of achieving.
“Civilization is unbearable, but it less unbearable at the top.” — Dr Timothy Leary
“Treat everyone you meet like God in drag.” – Ram Dass
I am completely and utterly, intentionally and explicitly, offline. I’m logged out, unplugged, and switched off.
The time I get most existential is when I consider I might miss out on much of the beauty of life because I’m in a rush to see more of it. Being offline and not moving from place to place is the antidote to this self-diagnosed existentialitis.
You’ll already know what I mean by ChatGPT. Its (her?) arrival has bottomless implications. We had forever assumed there was a great divide between human and animal intelligence. A gap as wide as that between our gods and us. Yet we’re discovering that intelligence is a matter of scaling, a difference not in step but by degree.
Taking the logic further, there is a wide range of potential intelligence. In which case, earth-bound human and nonhuman animal intelligence will look similar to one another compared with the larger ones we’ll create. I’m reminded of Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation when reading about our de-throning as World Kings. In Animal Liberation, Singer (radically at the time) defines us as human animals — another category of animals, not a distinct class. In the spirit of closing the gap between ‘us’ and nonhuman animals, Singer says:
“What we must do is bring nonhuman animals within our sphere of moral concern and cease to treat their lives as expendable for whatever trivial purposes we may have.”
So, some questions spring to mind: What then will come of us as human animals? When will the same books be written by the descendants of ChatGPT, SingerGPT, about us human animals? What will we do when we’re neither the most intelligent, nor most creative, nor most durable beasts? What is our new place in the world?
With ‘bigger’ intelligence among us, we will suddenly start looking much more animal-like; we shit and cry and fornicate. In predicting this, it cripples ambition. It undermines our traditional sense of what success means. Success will become monopoly money.
The answer to all these questions are found taking time offline, and experiencing life in its most simple and pure form; living for the sake of living, not for the sake of achieving. When we’re asked why, the answer ‘because I felt like it’ will be reason enough. And maybe we’ll realise we didn’t need ChatGPT to learn these lessons.
No books this week because I’m offline!
Live well,
Hector