Rui CarmoIt’s early Summer, and the slanted sunlight from beneath the drawn blinds reminds me it’s a balmy 30oC outside in a way the orange arc that frames the temperature complication on my Apple Watch can’t, spraying warmth into the living room, so I retire to the rear balcony and spent an hour reading Pattern Recognition in a slightly faded lounger, the tarp taut with my weight.
The breeze and relative quiet (I can hear birds sing, even if there is still traffic noise) reminds me of how much we rely on intangibles these days, and how much of our time (and thought) is now taken up by stuff we can’t really touch or feel and can barely see–political ideologies, technology abstractions, all manner of conceptual frameworks that we tend to get caught up on and spend too much time worrying about, no matter how brittle and inconsistent.
This tendency to rely on the immaterial has a pretty obvious exponent in currency, which we’ve turned into numbers on ledgers, then into bits in banking systems, and have been progressively adding levels of indirection to (stock markets, crypto, etc.) to a point where it might as well be hypothetical. And yet nothing gets our civilization more riled up than money.
Well, other than religion, of course. Religion has beliefs, politics ideology and technology generally operates on abstractions, although most of it seems to thrive on hype these days. But the way people have shifted towards believing in technology has me a little worried, especially given the shockingly massive amounts of, well, intangible money that was spent distilling the Internet into AI oracles.
AI might be the closest thing to religion to come out of technology yet, given the flabbergasting amount of beliefs it’s been fomenting. More the reason, perhaps, to focus on what is tangible, since this civilization has certainly not been a very tidy and organized one so far.