The other day I was
in a matatu and I didn’t have a phone so my range of activities was reduced to
people watching as an avenue of passing the time.
I wasn’t at the
window seat so my subjects were limited to only the people in the matatu with
me. I would glance at the people around me, most engrossed in their phones,
with ear pods so deep into their ears one would be inclined to think they were
born with them. A few years ago, a ride in a matatu or any public transport was
characterized by a buzz of activities, people talked, laughed, argued, slept –
but not anymore. Now we have phones, and with that, we have muted our mouths,
only our eyes and ears do the talking with a little help from our fingers
endlessly scrolling through our little screens.
Initially, it wasn’t
surreal to find two or three people reading a book or newspaper at the matatu,
it was the norm. For those who didn’t have any printed material, they resorted
to eating, sleeping, or watching the outside world as it disappeared behind
them, marveling at the wondrous sight out there. I personally enjoyed watching
trees and banners as they vanished from my sight, the faces of people I would
see for a split second as they disappeared, knowing very well that I would
never see them again till kingdom come. There was a certain aura in the air
anytime I traveled, some kind of poetry and romance between the machinery, the
smell of gas, nature, and the people both in and out of the vessel.
Now, there isn’t
that kind of romance anymore. I am not saying that people endlessly scrolling
through their phones, leaving everybody else to their own devices (pun
intended) is a bad thing. Far from it. It is our intellectual excellence at
play. My problem is that there is no poetry, no musicality, and no enigma.
Let’s abandon that argument because while in the matatu, my thoughts took a
completely different turn.
Imagine when we were
used to consuming large pieces of information, thousands of pages of books,
without any fatigue. It was intrigue that propelled us and so for us, it wasn’t
really about time or the bulkiness, it was desire. I remember reading about 700
pages of a novel in one Saturday while in high school, and I didn’t really take
the time to appreciate that power, that novelty. Now, information has been
condensed into tiny bits like food broken down to feed a baby whose chewing
ability is still developing. Imagine blending a piece of steak so that you can
just drink it in a few seconds and get it over with. Sure, you will save time,
and you might get the necessary nutrients, but will you enjoy it? Here is
another imagery – imagine if we could ingest alcohol the same way the sick get
their water, through pipes. You will get drunk even faster than the other
person who went into a bar, cuddled up with his mistress or a group of friends
and got drunk the old fashioned way. But that’s not what we are after, is it? I
think that’s what has changed.
It is not that we have
become lazy, we have become too focused on value rather than the process. Let
me explain further. You are a student, right? You are supposed to pass your
exams, you know that no exam is often deeply focused on a certain topic,
because you read thousands of pages only to answer a handful of questions. You
have two options: to read through the entire thousands of pages, wasting your
precious time in the process, or use AI and other programming models to predict
for you with ultimate precision the questions most likely to be asked and then
tackle the pages with those questions. You can then use the same AI to
summarize everything for you, and if you are of sufficient intelligence, you
can finish the whole thing in several hours – something that should have taken
you weeks. If you are smart enough, you can pay someone to take the test for
you altogether.
That is why I say
that we have lost the poetry of it all, we are so concerned with the value that
we create, the output, that we don’t care about how we look while generating
that output. There is no finesse, no panache. A friend of mine explained it to
me like this: imagine a man who works at a farm, waking up at 5am every
morning, retreating to his bed at 10pm every night. You don’t need to be told
how demanding of your physicality and strength farm work is. He has no days
off. After working for months, he has the product, probably maize or beans or
even some goats. He is ready for the market, but there is another predicament
awaiting him – the market is controlled by forces beyond him. A broker or a
middleman will make a few calls, connect the farmer to a buyer, and in the
process making a killing for himself. The entire time that the farmer was
toiling under the scorching sun, the broker was just lounging around, but when
the time to reap where hadn’t sown came, he ran to collect. Who is to blame?
You see, the value that the broker brings to the table is quite higher than the
one the farmer brings. It’s not fair, but that is how it works. Being busy is
no longer enough, the question is what are you busy doing?
Look at a man like
Elon Musk for example. Yes, they say that he works about 16 hours a day, which
is insane, but there are people who work 20 hours a day and their fortunes
isn’t even a billionth of his. Let’s take a waiter who works several jobs,
amounting to about 20 hours a day. Between the waiter and Elon Musk, whose work
is more intellectually demanding? The kind of decisions that Elon Musk makes
affects millions of people – one slip of judgement on his part can result to
shifts in economies, it can cause millions to sleep on the streets. What about
the waiter? He can miss an order or break a bottle of wine, and it is only him
who will suffer the consequences. It also explains why people from third world
countries are swarming into the western countries like bees. The people of the
United States for example have understood the trick: any work that requires you
to be there physically to use your hands isn’t going to pay you enough.
Gradually, over time, they have gravitated towards the intellectually demanding
aspects of their work, and so the other aspects that demand a lot of
physicality have been left vacant for those of us in the third world economies.
I think it was in one of his books that Nassim Taleb said that it costs more to
design a shoe than to make it, and it costs much less time to design a shoe
than to make it. Imagine the shoe designer of Nike, and then imagine the
millions of people who slave away at the Nike warehouses, making the shoes. One
man’s fortune is so large that it can’t even compare to the fortune of the
millions combined. Perhaps it’s because with just one good shoe design, through
replication, a billion shoes can be made from it. Value and output.
Now, do I think it
is a bad thing? Far from it. It is a good thing in the sense that we are
experiencing a new dawn in our civilization. Imagine how the world changed when
fire was invented, or electricity, or the wheel, or even the airplane. This is
what history has accorded us, and we can’t afford to look at it as a curse. It
is now the easiest to make a fortune, it reminds me of the Industrial
Revolution. Before the likes of Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Thomas
Rockefeller, and even JP Morgan, it wasn’t easy for the child of a Nobody to
become one of the richest – that was a quality accorded only to the royalties,
the sons of kings. If you had ambition, you had to take up arms and earn your
name. As you can imagine, that was a very tedious process. But then the
industrial revolution comes, and anyone with the smarts to outmaneuver and
outshine his competitors could make a homerun and become one of the richest in
the world.
What we are going
through is the industrial revolution reincarnate. I have seen young people with
no sufficient education nor intelligence make millions and change the course of
their family’s history through one sufficiently placed bet. An opportunity
presented itself and they seized it.
Enough of that, let
me talk about the lack of romance and the poetry of it all, because that is
what drove me to write this piece in the first place. With the fact that we
have artificial intelligence at our disposal, it also means that we are spoilt
for choice. There are so many things that demand to be consumed by us that we
won’t know which one deserves our attention. If I want to learn about a certain
topic or even listen to a certain kind of music and I type in my browser ‘jazz
music to listen to while sad,’ you best believe that what will appear on my
screen are those with high exposure, that is the most views. My screen can only
accommodate about 20 results at most – of course there are more, but my
impatience won’t allow me to look at them all. So, just the 20 results are too
much for me, and it doesn’t mean that just because they are the most viewed,
then they are what I wanted in the first place. The algorithm only gives me
what it believes I might like, and how does it know that I might like it? Well,
if more people watched it and liked it, then there is a chance I might as well.
It doesn’t know me personally, so it will treat me as one of the many – that’s
how fucked up this is. The next issue arises. If we consume the same content,
over and over, it will reach a time where there is no difference between you
and me, we will be like twins or zombies – hypnotized to think the same way. I
don’t know about you but I hate the idea of thinking the same. It is said that
when two people think alike, then one of them is not thinking. But then,
another quote which might be appropriate for this discussion is the one by
Hoffer, ‘when people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each
other.’
This new frontier
will strip us of our individuality, leave us naked for all to see, but nobody
will mind because one man’s nakedness won’t be different from the next one. I
told someone that it’s only us who can differentiate between one person and the
next, do you think a cow looks at you as ugly or handsome, or learned or
stupid? To a cow, we are all humans. That’s how we will become even to
ourselves as far as our thinking is concerned.
Add the issue of
chips in our brains and you are home. If a brain chip can synchronize itself
with a man’s thoughts that it can play chess on the computer and move pieces without
the person controlling it with a mouse or anything, imagine what will be
accomplished in a hundred years. There are both the positive and the negative I
suppose. Perhaps there will be ways to know who is thinking of committing a
crime before he does, but also free thinking will suffer greatly. With our
capitalism and enterprising spirit, I won’t be surprised if there will be a
premium package for free thinking.
Life as we know it
is disintegrating into ashes. In a way, for every technology, life changes, but
our technology is quite different. Naval Ravikant claims that technology is
anything that the world needs but has no way of making it yet. So, by that
logic, the wheel was a technology, the salt was a technology, fire, and
everything else that had an immense impact on our way of life. I read
somewhere, The Singularity by Ray
Kurzweil, I think, that if one was to bring back to life a person from the
fifteenth century, and take them on a walk in New York City, the person would
collapse and die. We can make that interesting and bring a person like
Shakespeare back to life – he was a man of imagination, perhaps his mind can
conceive the magnitude of civilization that we have accomplished, but he won’t
survive either. In the same book, Ray says by the end of this century, we won’t
have achieved 100 years of technological advancement, but an equivalent of
20,000 years of the same. Imagine that for a second.
Allow me to stop
here for now, when one thinks too much, he ends up making circles thinking that
he is making anew point when in fact he is just repeating himself, quite poorly
in fact. Look at it the way you want to, that is free thinking right there.
Enjoy it when you still can.
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