Human Loops

(Whatever Substack is doing with its own algorithm, I would say it has at least a good shot at generating some actual conversations again as a social platform. Not like the Old Internet or Old Twitter but better than the current algorithmic mess on the rest.) Another Matthew reached out last week in the Substack chat with a recent post of his all about meaning, time, structures and relationships, which is the next major level or aspect of Human Loops we are going to look at.

How do you react to or interpret life when you can no longer be sure if a loving message was written by your partner or their AI assistant? This is the level at which we need to start thinking about Artificial Intelligence. We have talked about the structures we are subject to in life normally. AI represents a new kind of structural force, and it will impact how you interpret and live in the world in multiple, deeply personal ways.

Before we talk about AI, you have to see this GREAT example of personal structural change that came up in one of my feeds over the weekend. Mr. Beast challenged a friend of his to lose 100 lbs in a year, with a $250,000 prize incentive. It was Mr. Beast, so it was all recorded for a social media reality video. (Short version here. Full video here.) That doesn’t really matter.

Imagine you are a 100-year old European family company, now with a few billion dollars in capital, thousands of employees, and operations across several continents. You started out all the way back in the 19th Century, in a very conservative Victorian society. The Industrial Revolution was underway, the working class was being shoved into urban poor houses for the new factories, Marx was writing about communism, the machine gun hadn't been invented yet.

Imagine you are a 100-year old European family company, now with a few billion dollars in capital, thousands of employees, and operations across several continents. You started out all the way back in the 19th Century, in a very conservative Victorian society. The Industrial Revolution was underway, the working class was being shoved into urban poor houses for the new factories, Marx was writing about communism, the machine gun hadn't been invented yet.

So, you’re still alive, still here, well done! Now what? We are all stuck in structures and situations, lots of them, which create different roles, relationships and obligations, and which determine limits or opportunities in some layer of our existence, even sometimes survival itself, for some period of time, now or into the future. The news is full of interesting, if extreme, examples that constantly grab our attention.

Sometimes life ends very abruptly. The sands of time run out, whether you were expecting it or not this morning. A heart attack, you get knocked over by a speeding car, your plane crashes, something falls on your head, you get shot, you slip in the wrong place at the wrong moment. Whatever unexpected thing it is, you're done, you're gone, you're out of here. No last wishes, no last messages to your wife or your kids, and maybe not even a last real moment of awareness, if it's really quick.

The full Human Loops framework is very broad and very deep and can be applied fractally to all sorts of complex, multi-layered situations in all sorts of fields of activity, in a scale invariant manner. Personal relationships, business, politics, whole societies. But you need an idea of where to get started.