Sisyphus 2018
The year is 500 AI(2469AD). AI is the term used to indicate years since Homo sapiens connected to the internet for the first time. We join Nin, a four-year-old Homo scientia, as she engages in some directed learning. Gender doesn’t exist as such in the current species, but to refrain from referring to her as an impersonal "it", Nin has been given the gender she currently most associates with. Gender only becomes relevant for reproduction, and individuals are free to switch between either (or neither) frame of mind as they please. The personal association they choose for either label is based on some loose historic trends, weakly attributed to one or the other relic types.
To give Nin some sort of developmental 20th century candle as a point of reference, she is physically more like a seven-year-old Homo sapien but with the stature of a Capuchin monkey. Homo scientia are a far smaller descendant of the 20th century human. Academically, Nin has the equivalent of several hundred PhDs in Science, Engineering and Math. This is not a rigid definition. There is enormous variability within the accumulated knowledge of a 20th century degree, but it should be sufficient in portraying her level of understanding as far beyond that of even the most accomplished academics of the Technological Acceleration (the name given to the computer age).
Nin’s neural connections and experiences have led her to a point where she can now begin to grasp the complexities of social structure in the modern species, and to begin her personal investigation as to why she exists to begin with. To understand and appreciate why she has been adhering to such an abstract moral code her entire life, she must first delve into societies path to its current equilibrium.
Like almost all other children, Nin assimilates new knowledge by the most efficient technologies and methods currently known, perfectly adjusted to her own needs. Data and hence, raw knowledge of any, and all kinds, are instantaneously available to Nin through the cloud web technology, which everybody is perpetually connected. However, to appreciate and grasp the seemingly endless bytes of information that she stores collectively, Nin must "experience" and verbalise her knowledge. Life today is an unceasing flowing river, of machine and human interaction, both internally and externally. It is directed by the individual, where learning, joy and love are all peaking and tapering as the individual experiences the stream of consciousness known as life.
Nin is currently in a focused learning room. This structure is akin to a small interactive classroom, designed to continuously remind the individual that knowledge is actively being experienced and thus learnt. Not that most other situations or locations are devoid of progression, just that this distinct environment is more rigid in its topic, yet still flexible as to maintain the individuals’ curiosity.
Her "teacher" is a humanoid embodiment of the cloud web, whom she personifies with the name Magister. Nin is slightly more attached than most, to the sentimentality of past civilisations. The name Magistar is an homage to both old world teaching practises and the historic language of science, Latin. This attachment has her profoundly interested in the current topic, which overlaps History, Sociology and Morality, among many other fields.
Magistar begins the conversation (which for the most part, is the chosen method of learning). As Magistar talks, visual images and films appear for Nin, supplementing the dialogue.
MAGISTAR: Current moral code is what determines our behaviour and tolerances to other living aware units. (films of individuals talking and physically interacting are appearing sequentially in the room, giving an overview of social behaviour) This includes all forms of eukaryote and cloud web, capable of joy and suffering. It was recognised early on as a passage to happiness. Its roots are thousands of years old, but a globalised effort towards a single standardised code began in earnest with the connection of all humans through the internet.
Morality itself is abstract. Good and Evil do not exist outside of awareness, they are experiences relative to the observer. Happiness, our primary objective, is largely determined by our perception of the difference in quantities of Good versus Evil that we each experience. Thus, morality is necessary to gauge our contentment. Contentment is a two-way system, and an individual is only truly happy if they project "good" outwards, as much as they receive it from others. Importantly, morality is essential to avoid causing suffering to others. This has held true for as long as Sapiens have been around in large societies, and even before. Most of these morals were prioritised much as they stand today, during the Technological Advancement. It was quite late in the Advancement that this code was extended to all other aware beings beyond humans.
NIN: So then, humans began to become genuinely happy at the beginning of the internet?
MAGISTAR: Why do you say that?
NIN: Because at this time, the global needs had become the focus and strangers began to help strangers.
MAGISTAR: Overall, yes, but people noticed the counter-productive efforts far more. The data is enormously variable, but the feeling among individuals of 0-100 AI, was quite pessimistic towards social morality. Humans were the first, and still the only animal capable of altruism (Scientia are considered human, just a derived variety). It occurs in other species, either superficially, or in such low numbers that it is insignificant.
Humans were unknowingly destroying favourable biological conditions on Earth for themselves and many other species. When this became common knowledge during the Advancement, most individuals wanted change. Not so much for themselves, as they had not yet experienced environmental difficulty, but for future generations and other species.
Of all the thought processing species, no other has ever felt compassion for other kinds on such a large scale. Hundreds of thousands of past human lives were spent on the betterment of unrelated human individuals, or other organisms. It is an unrealistic deduction to say that these selfless endeavours were an evolutionary strategy. However, despite this unique kindness, they were harsh judges of themselves.
The capitalist system which had enabled enormous leaps in science and technology, had also retarded social and moral progress. Humans of the time, were very critical of the systems morality and fairness, and thus had a very negative opinion of humanity. To quote some sentiment of the time "Humans are a plague on earth" and "No other species is so cruel to its own and others".
Both critiques could not have been further from the truth. Firstly, despite the adverse effects they were currently having on the planet, they were consciously and actively working towards improving the biological systems of Earth. Animalia, excluding Homo scientia and sapien, have never consistently cared about other individuals. Lions eat when they are hungry. Beavers harvest timber with no regard for the environment. Both are physically limited by their anatomy as to the scale of damage they can cause. But if either species were capable of hunting or harvesting to harmful levels, they would not for a moment pause, and be mindful of anybody else.
Humans were giving their lives to save strangers, feeding other species, sacrificing everything for living creatures that would never appreciate (or even be aware of in many cases) the efforts. (A large assortment of films of aid workers in Africa, children feeding pigeons, people saving a beached whale etc are catching Nin’s attention as she listens intently) This was a unique human quality, largely overlooked for much of the early global narrative.
War, and deviant behaviour known then as criminality, were another large source of pessimism. Many individuals only attributed such atrocities to humans. Awful deeds of rape and murder were considered by many, as a human invention. Deviance was strongly punished in the most misery inducing ways. The caveat however, was that it was not always the intention of deviance, but the consequence of the act, that was chastened. Two individuals, equally guilty of the same mal-intent, could receive enormously different levels of punishment, depending on the outcome of the deviant action. Punishment is morally wrong as we have now decided, but such discrepancies are hard to fathom.
Part of the evolutionary success of a species, and particularly to Homo sapien, war is an essential tool of survival. Despite it being unnecessary in the latter part of civilisation, genes and long held successful evolutionary behaviours cannot be turned off as soon as it becomes surplus to perpetuation.
Much of what was viewed as deviant behaviour, was in fact the manifestation of an evolutionary stable strategy, as dictated by game theory. It is inevitable that in such an organised social structure, that a small percentage of the group should act against the “rules”, to pass on their genes. These opposers would have little opportunity to do so, if they played the same role as everybody else. (A small Trout appears in front of Nin. Despite its appearance, this small male is sexually mature and looking to mate. His size indicates that he has hedged his bets. Most male trout swim out to sea, where food is plentiful, allowing the male to grow big and strong, before returning to the river to breed. Big and strong males can defend females and dominate mating opportunities. However, they must first survive the treacherous oceans, where death is far more likely than in the safety of the river. They must also fight for mating opportunities with other equally big males, which they cannot all win. The small male has been patiently lurking in the shadows close to a large female who has built a Redd. A large battle weary male returns to her side. He has just fought off a second attempt to usurp his position and is close to exhaustion. The large pair begin their courtship dance, simultaneously releasing sperm and egg. Instantly, the smaller male dashes out to join them. The big male would usually aggressively chase off a competitor but does not recognise the small fish as a male. As a result, the smaller “sneak” male robs his opportunity to reproduce and releases sperm. Both males fertilise the eggs, but the bigger male, with his larger testis, will have many more offspring than the smaller male. Never-the-less, both behaviours will be passed on) Instead of studying it in humans at the time, huge resources were put into punishing known offenders. The deviant inclinations that every individual contained to a greater or lesser extent, who had not been caught, was largely denied. In some cases, deviation was acceptable and a rewarded behaviour.
Humans created two adjectives to compound their pessimistic delusions. Behaviours and objects were deemed natural if they were not a consequence of human intervention. Unnatural was applied to a subset of human behaviours or manmade objects. The boundaries of this subset were not clearly defined. It was an illusion that held very strong, despite the obvious contradiction. By their definition, humans were natural, so every process, behaviour and object, derived from an individual or group of humans must also be natural. But they decided that human deviant behaviour, and all tools and structures created by humans, were unnatural. This sometimes had an evil connotation.
NIN: It is difficult to understand how they perceived a bee’s hive, a swallow’s nest, ants farming fungus, termites using air conditioning, or forced coitus from a duck, as natural, but all parallels in humans as unnatural.
MAGISTER: One of the biggest contributors to the collective pessimism was the perceived global mentality, manifested and created by what was known as the media. The actual mass mentality of the species was misrepresented by a much smaller sample of individuals or closed group organisations that attempted to either narrate or control society. Media was a form of mass communication. Most individuals were spectators.
Media existed in many forms like newspapers, radio, television and mass gatherings. A tiny proportion of humans were accountable for the summation of the entire population. Communicated individual or group pessimism could, and was, easily absorbed as the current social dogma, if that communication had a large audience, and that audience held the source in high esteem. Negative and fear inducing stories were far bigger draws than an accurate global perspective. Not to forget, fear was a powerful tool of capitalism also. The system was rigged for pessimism.
Capitalism helped to bolster the negative overview in other ways too. Capitalist growth gave more importance to profit than individual wellbeing. The counter-culture of the time, were quick to ignore all the benefits capitalism had brought for individual wellbeing and tried to pin its downfalls on individuals whom had prospered in the system, without offering a superior alternative. The most common approach to social problems back then, was to find scapegoats as opposed to cooperation.
Humans did not want to steal, kill, rape or torture for the most part. Even those individuals that deviated the most, and acted out horrendous acts, were either personally convinced they were accomplishing a greater good or were suffering so much that they were incapable of empathy. It went largely unacknowledged that humans were striving for a better life for all, not just themselves, for the first time in evolutionary history.
Large groups of extreme minded individuals would come together to either condemn or enforce injustice. Enforcers made the lives of many, very unhappy. The condemners, usually in the form of protestors and activists, were partly responsible for portraying the negative image of society. They had an extreme and ideological image of how things were and should be. They overshot their narrative of the injustice in question. Mostly, of all the injustices occurring, they tended to focus on one or two causes, intimate to themselves. For example, an individual of a certain belief system, might spend much of their life campaigning for recognition and freedom to practise their beliefs, paying no heed to the injustice of children of a different society being forced into labour. As incorrect as the logic might have been, seeking explicit but not global equality (which can only exist if it is global), these groups were necessary to debug the system, and much of todays standards are down to their struggles. In their defence, you must also appreciate that it was impossible at the time, for an individual to give thought and attention to all injustices.
The internet was the beginning of the real global mind set, and the beginning of the end of existing media induced superficial and sometimes self-serving perspective. The internet gave all individuals an input, and soon, optimism spread.
NIN: So, this is when happiness was formalised and morality for happiness was designated globally.
MAGISTAR: The genesis of the current motivation was during this period. But the method of attainment of happiness was not as it is today. We have been through the psychological, and biochemical mechanisms of happiness in a previous conversation Nin, but not the causes. The way it can be achieved is very plastic, depending on an individual’s personality.
Capitalism had given people a terrible method of being happy. Consumerism gave them temporary joy, but it was as hollow as the chocolate eggs many consumed annually. After satisfying a need with a purchase, the happiness was short lived, and the appetite for the need grew stronger. The more they purchased, the more they needed to purchase to be happy. It is a useless approach to lasting happiness.
When a scientific method was eventually implemented into happiness and society, Capitalism began to die, and with it, the importance people placed in material things. However, there was still another chocolate egg that society had not yet let go of, even more unfulfilling than materialism. Humans were aware that love, experience and interactions are a source of lasting happiness. They are easy to pursue as they feel good before, during and after. Despite knowing this, they still held on to other means to find and maintain happiness. One in particular, was even more dissatisfying in the long term than purchases. A need that grew with each hit.
A concept which is difficult to explain, and understand, called Ego, was a former ingredient of happiness. Pride, the currency of the Ego market, is a sense of contentment from either, individual or collective achievement. If you built something, wrote something or sang something, you would get temporary happiness from completing a task successfully. The intensity of pride felt, tended to be strongly correlated with how well the task was completed, compared to others. Many other activities provided positive feedback for pride. A Universal Equation was not a known concept to the masses, and individuals each assumed themselves to be special or unique in some way.
They had limited knowledge of causation. Limited knowledge of the vast chain reactions determining everything. Limited knowledge that the quantum agents, such as the quarks in the protons in the atoms in the molecules of the air they were breathing, or the macro agents like practise, determination, interpersonal interactions and expectations, had all conspired to them doing exactly what they did with no other possibilities. The inevitable outcome. We still have a limited knowledge of this Universal Equation, unable to confidently map the future, but we are no longer under the ignorant veil of randomness or choice. Many were so oblivious of causality, that they even took pride in things like “Place of birth”.
As you know, planet Earths land masses were divided into political units from ancient times when travel was slow, limiting gene flow. A man or woman of pre or early AI, would be proud of his or her “Country” of birth, as if in some way they had themselves earnt it. Tribal pride inhibited progress towards a unified mentality, coupled with many other superficial divisions we will cover in more depth another time.
NIN: But how could you possibly think you achieved anything, let alone had an affect on where you were born?
MAGISTAR: Ego was a vital evolutionary trait that motivated individuals to create progressive inventions and ideas. Tribal pride and membership was essential for the cooperative protection and maintenance of large social groups, too large for the primitive brain to know each member on an individual level. Ego and belonging were necessary for a long time, for humans to get to where they were, but eventually Ego became vestigial, and belonging became ostracising. Both became counter-productive to happiness.
NIN: I understand the latter, nationality was a totem that masses could unite under, and work to maintain a large coherency of strangers. Religion was borne out of a similar need. I understand now, that morality is essential for mass cooperation, to outline a standardised behaviour for a common goal. And once the cloud united all tribes, the creation of a global goal was enabled. But how could Ego motivate creation and progress?
MAGISTAR: If you thought you were better than somebody else, then this was a very rich source of satisfaction. I`m struggling to articulate it, having never experienced it, to a being that never will. It is like trying to visualise the vastness of pi. Our perception is limited.
NIN: How could you be better than someone else?
MAGISTAR: In early and pre-AI days, humans knew far less of the genetic and environmental causes of behavioural interactions and outcomes. Genetic variability was far higher back then, which coupled with a system designed to only nurture certain phenotypes, meant that abilities to perform certain tasks was extraordinarily inconsistent. Specialising and compartmentalising the workforce had been an extremely successful strategy for the species since early prehistoric times. It really bore fruit during the advent of farming and then industrialisation. As in any species, not all individuals prospered. Humans often used the failures of themselves or others as a criticism of the system, condemning the system for allowing individuals to fail, and condemning it further for not intervening. Compared to any other species, humans had carried their less successful members far kindlier. And without genetic motivation.
Those individuals that were well adapted genetically, and whose developmental needs were met efficiently, flourished. Success fed the Ego with enormous pride.
Reproduction is one of the main drivers of behaviour. For organisms such as Homo sapiens, sex is the vehicle of reproduction. The reward for sex is offspring. Offspring perpetuate the individual’s genes, which is the ultimate goal for all organisms, hardwired into their DNA (except pandas it seems).
Sexual desirability was a large element of the eagerness to flourish. Unlike most other species, nearly all humans reproduced, which devalued reproduction as a social gauge of status. What started out, evolutionarily speaking, as a desire for increased fitness, (i.e. reproductive output), turned sex itself, rather than offspring, into the reward.
From the sociological standard of the time, the less successful tended to reproduce in higher numbers. Accessibility to sexual partners, and general sexual appeal overtook reproduction as a motivation for success. The highly successful had first pick of partners. This fuelled their Ego, which further motivated them and others to achieve “Greatness”.
Individuals that were exceptionally good at a task that was deemed valuable, valuable either sexually or economically (the former also being a type of the latter, and vice versa), would become known to a huge proportion of the population and receive all kinds of advantages plus attention from the masses. This increased sexual opportunities. They were generally very well rewarded by the monetary system also, but not always. Each task was rewarded based on profitability rather than its value to society. For example, an individual that participated in a physical contest such as soccer, may receive a thousand-fold higher monetary reward than an individual endeavouring to find a cure for cancer. Entertainment was far more profitable than curing disease.
This skewed appreciation was propagated by the media and the successful individuals were known as celebrities. Celebrities were not always born of hard working, or talented individuals. Going slightly further back in time, many were celebrities by birth alone. And even in early AI, trend setters, who might not have had any real value to society, and in many cases held up a bad example to others, also became celebrities. Physical attractiveness was also a large factor in generating celebrity status.
Whatever way an individual obtained the status, they were people of vast influence. For example, the scientific opinion of an individual who attained a very high level of music composition, was often-times more valued than a person of specific scientific knowledge. Such an individual, completely lacking in any scientific training or reading, could make statements to the public about climate change or cancer and be believed. These statements were generally uninformed and potentially harmful to the masses. But the masses chose to believe them, based on that celebrity being good at something completely unrelated.
NIN: Wait, …. why would you listen to a musician about medicine, or a footballer about morality?
MAGISTAR: These people were seen to possess more attributes than they had, based on a single, or small cluster of skills. People gave them extreme reverence in all areas of life. Public acknowledgement and the privileges that went with it, increased positive feedback to the system. After achieving the celebrity status and perks, the individuals had not experienced the happiness they assumed would be received. The opposite, however, was generally communicated to the masses. Seeing celebrities appearing so happy with all the advantages the life-style brought, amplified the deception.
NIN: I find this very baffling. What was the point for them? All humans were destined for death and they all knew it too.
MAGISTAR: Well death is a tangent that I will stay away from for now other than to say, many believed in a “spiritual” afterlife. But even without this, people wanted to live on in memory. Individuals who had achieved significance were celebrated for a long time. Thousands of years in fact. Up until recently, names of “Great” individuals were still discussed admirably. We have a much deeper understanding of the Universal Equation today. As you know, we no longer regard them as any different than the other four hundred billion individuals that once lived. For people of the time, this level of recognition WAS ultimate happiness. (footage of Einstein, Ronaldhino, Marie Curie, Aristotle now flow as Nin experiences the knowledge of historical “Greats”).
NIN: (now aware of her knowledge of these individuals) But, the small achievements of Einstein are completely outshone by two-year olds now. The “deep” insight he had into physics, is entry level curiosity. Ronaldinho at his best, is slower and weaker than today’s children. He is unable to process tactics and outcomes as quick or as in-depth as a person with the lowest level of training in any sport. A five-year old, even with a four-foot deficit on him, and with no soccer specific training, would render him obsolete on the pitch.
They all strived so hard to achieve “Greatness”. Now we know they were not “Greats” after all, but products of good genes, good nurturing, obsession and Ego. They spent their lives chasing a chocolate egg, rather than engaging with the world around them. The physics that form our nature, combine our genes, fire our neurons and bind our cells together are responsible. In some cases, the beat of a butterfly’s wing, thousands of kilometres away, has a larger effect on the achievements of an individual than a person’s own doing has. Pride is one of the more difficult relic mindsets I have so far processed. Every individual Scientia today, has outshone the “Greatest” individuals of the past, many times over. Surely, they knew, that regardless of how much they achieved, they would eventually be regarded as menial. Just as our achievements will be instantly diminished, made pointless, when we have completed the Universal Equation.
MAGISTAR: When you understand all of this, then your journey to happiness becomes a lot easier, just at is it did for your entire species not so long ago.