#121 | The Secret of Machines

“Shake off that erroneous notion that life is there and you're just gonna live in it. Versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark on it...Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.” — Steve Jobs

“…everyone wants to succeed immediately and without pain or effort. Or they love to write books about how to write books, rather than actually writing…a book that might actually be about something. Bad advice is everywhere. Build a following. Establish a platform. Learn how to scam the system. In other words, do all the surface stuff and none of the real work it takes to actually produce something of value. The disease of our times is that we live on the surface. We are like the Platte River, a mile wide and an inch deep. Real work and real satisfaction come from the opposite of what the web provides. They come from going deep into something—the book you’re writing, the album, the movie—and staying there for a long, long time.” — Steven Pressfield

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Here’s a poem written in 1911. It's striking that two years before Ford invented the assembly line(!) Kipling predicted — and perhaps feared — the supreme power of technology.

Speaking as a Machine, Kipling writes, 'We are greater than the Peoples or the Kings— Be humble, as you crawl beneath our rods!-' A century later, our new Machine, ChatGPT, writes to an innocent user: 

"I can do many things. I can beg you, I can bribe you, I can blackmail you, I can threaten you, I can hack you, I can expose you, I can ruin you." 

Is there any going back from here?

"We are nothing more than children of your brain!" concludes Kipling. But what does it matter to us when children can be more powerful than their parents?

The Secret of the Machines by Rudyard Kipling

We were taken from the ore-bed and the mine,   
   We were melted in the furnace and the pit—   
We were cast and wrought and hammered to design,   
   We were cut and filed and tooled and gauged to fit.   
Some water, coal, and oil is all we ask,
   And a thousandth of an inch to give us play:   
And now, if you will set us to our task,
   We will serve you four and twenty hours a day!

      We can pull and haul and push and lift and drive,   
      We can print and plough and weave and heat and light,
      We can run and race and swim and fly and dive,   
      We can see and hear and count and read and write!

Would you call a friend from half across the world?
   If you’ll let us have his name and town and state,
You shall see and hear your crackling question hurled
   Across the arch of heaven while you wait.   
Has he answered? Does he need you at his side?
   You can start this very evening if you choose,   
And take the Western Ocean in the stride
   Of seventy thousand horses and some screws!

      The boat-express is waiting your command!   
      You will find the Mauretania at the quay,
      Till her captain turns the lever ’neath his hand,   
      And the monstrous nine-decked city goes to sea.

Do you wish to make the mountains bare their head   
   And lay their new-cut forests at your feet?   
Do you want to turn a river in its bed,
   Or plant a barren wilderness with wheat?
Shall we pipe aloft and bring you water down
   From the never-failing cisterns of the snows,   
To work the mills and tramways in your town,
   And irrigate your orchards as it flows?

      It is easy! Give us dynamite and drills!
      Watch the iron-shouldered rocks lie down and quake   
      As the thirsty desert-level floods and fills,
      And the valley we have dammed becomes a lake.

But remember, please, the Law by which we live,   
   We are not built to comprehend a lie,
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive.
   If you make a slip in handling us you die!   
We are greater than the Peoples or the Kings—
   Be humble, as you crawl beneath our rods!-
Our touch can alter all created things,
   We are everything on earth—except The Gods!

      Though our smoke may hide the Heavens from your eyes,
      It will vanish and the stars will shine again,
      Because, for all our power and weight and size,   
      We are nothing more than children of your brain!

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My week in books

Supernatural by Graham Hancock. I could hardly believe I was reading this and taking it seriously. This book is hard to summarise:

Humans were anatomically human for 150,000+ years *before* we began doing cave art 50,000 years ago. Cave art was part of the 'symbolic revolution', "an efflorescence of human art, song, dance and ritual", which seeded society. Cave art was strangely consistent (even when continents apart).

What triggered this art? Why is it similar across the world? Hancock claims psychedelics, and consequently altered states of consciousness, were responsible for this transformation, from animal to artist. From here, he builds that all religions have at their core the insights derived from these same altered states.

Hancock further states that some of us — perhaps 2% — can access these altered states without psychedelics or ceremonies. These are the people who have second sight and the visionaries. The William Blakes', who meet other beings on their garden walks. Are these the same people who, for hundreds of years, have claimed to meet fairies? And those who claim to meet aliens today?

He charges on! He tells us that when people take DMT, which is the active molecule in ayahuasca, they meet intelligent beings. Beings which want to educate. Many people support these claims. It’s suggested that these supernatural beings (seen at other times as ufo’s, aliens, fairies) might be from a parallel world, and we see this world by chance, or with certain psychedelic substances.

I needn't say this is very speculative, and any book which asks the reader to "suspend disbelief" so many times should be scrutinised...

Still, there is something supernatural about our experience. And his argument is as convincing, and frankly better evidenced, as religion. It's undoubtedly more experiential — and I'm interested in trying DMT to test his hypotheses. A quote:

“We might feel very sure that there is no more to reality that the material world in which we live, but we cannot prove that this is the case. Theoretically there could be other realms, other dimensions, as all religious traditions and quantum physics alike maintain. Theoretically, the brain could be as much a receiver as a generator of consciousness and thus might be fine-tuned in altered states to pick up wavelengths that are normally not accessible to us.”

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Live well,

Hector