Technologies are stress tests for what makes us human

Prelude

§2: I’m fascinated by how such a sharp collective vibe shift has happened around social media, so quickly. In 2010, it was the bee’s knees, everyone loved it, it was hailed as one of our greatest inventions, Zuck was a hero. The tide turned in 2016, and today social media is being likened to cigarettes, and is being regulated across the globe. Zuck is regularly seen as an evil tech baron. What a change in just 15 years.

§3: Homo Sapiens has been around for 300,000 years. The internet is less than 70 years old. Social media just turned old enough to vote. Generative AI is a toddler in human terms, a speck in evolutionary ones.

§4: I do a lot of reading and thinking around how technology impacts culture. Whenever I read pieces around “how will GenAI impact music”, I invariably find questions like “first, let’s stop and ask what music is” or “what is art, anyway?”

§5: WTF are these bullets? Sorry, I’m a pretentious prog-metal fan.

Our collective immune system is kicking in

My belief is that a technology doesn’t change us - as short-term alarmist headlines and LinkedIn hot takes are wont to urgently conclude - it just tests what makes us human. Like how an exam doesn’t change a candidate, or how a brutal climb doesn’t change a cyclist1 … as much as tests them.

In that sense, I don’t think social media changed us. It just amplified the best and worst of us. To say it shortened attention spans is to assume that there was some “base attention span” to begin with. Even if there was some pre-existing level, it would have been a product of a previous technology - books, television, or other mediums of the time including communal gatherings.

Put another way, if our ancestors had access to an endless stream of easy-access dopamine, they’d be scrolling well into the night too. We’re still very much operating with the same hunter-gatherer DNA that we were a long time ago.

The aforementioned vibe shift against Big Tech and Social Media, I think, shows that our collective immune system has kicked in. Like it did for mass-produced sugar, the ozone layer, and some social problems.

I am not saying our species is faultless (far from it, daily it feels like our immune system is not very good at identifying some other pressing threats). But given the timespan of evolution, we do seem to have a knack for some correction, even if it doesn’t seem like it while living through it. I find that somewhat reassuring.

What the larger body our immunse system is defending is outside my scope of current thinking - are we trying to ensure our perpetuity, as is the case with most life?

The first principles of being human

Perhaps we can call these the first principles of being human. You can say every other human action - from coveting money, to wearing flashy brands, to writing half-baked Substack thought-pieces - can stem back to these first principles. All of these lend themselves to good and bad outcomes, across time, across cultures. The desire for money, for example, has given us many useful inventions, but also unfettered capitalism that’s destroying the natural world.

o give a small but instructive example, we went from mocking Airpods when they first came out, to collectively normalising them within a year. Did our need to socially conform help with that?

When I say technologies are stress tests for what makes us human, it’s these first principles I’m referring to. Social media’s addictive tendencies, the velocity that bad news seems to attain, the obesity epedemic, the unchecked ego of techbros - can all be traced back to them.

Second order effects

Generative AI provides another fascinating playground for all of this. It’s forcing us to confront some large questions that get to the heart of those human first principles.

What is art? Do we need human skills anymore? What will we do if all human-made jobs are done by machines? What does the tech-fuelled analog renaissance say about us? Why do we prefer a child’s scribble over a ‘perfect’ AI image?

We can come up with answers to each of these and abstract them agnostic of technology. For example: We value the time that a child has come up with to make something for us, rather than the theoretical absolute best image output. That means we place a price on some intangible - and that’s irrespective of technology3.

I’m sure you’ve come across someone saying: I’m so sick and tired of seeing obviously AI-generated rubbish on LinkedIn, that when I see someone post something human - even if imperfect in argument or even with typos - I am thankful, and I pay attention to it. Generative AI took us from Grammar Nazis to seeking imperfection! How the tables turn in such a short period of time.

I feel that it’s the second order effects of any technology when the aspects of humanity reveal themselves. For example, cars were invented to take people from A to B (a first-order effect), but soon came identity & signalling, teenage car culture, racing for entertainment (second-order effects) - the more human aspects. The same happened to the internet - an erstwhile functional technology which, when left in the wild of human experience and capitalism for a few decades - amplified our best and worst tendencies. Some of the obvious ill effects of social media today, were not very apparent back in 2005.

And I feel the same will happen of Generative AI. We’re living through its first-order effects phase. Soon, those big questions will be answered. The human first principles will be at play. It’ll be fascinating to observe.

Perhaps the most philosophical way of looking at this whole thing is: Every technology we create is pushing us to question increasingly fundamental questions.

In the time of the early internet, “what makes us human” would have been a question relegated to weed smoke-addled dorm rooms. In the age of social media, there may have been some flutterings on Reddit discussing it. In an era of Generative AI, though, a lot of people seem to be asking Google that question.

Epilogue

It’s the year 2075.

Close to 60 years after the American public turned on Facebook and were made aware of its ills. 10 years later, there were concerted efforts around the world to limit access to social media to teenagers around the world. There was resistance and workarounds (what a charming technology VPNs was), but eventually things were implemented, just like alcohol and tobacco were much before.

It ushered in an era of understanding that it’s not just physical products that could be addictive to humans, and ushered in a new era of technological regulation. And about time too, some of those laws were written when the internet wasn’t even invented, or its antique predecessor, the telephone.

These laws eventually led to the global regulation of Generative AI, which was in its infancy in the mid-2020s. And thank goodness! Can you imagine what would happen if absolutely anyone could prompt absolutely anything into absolutely any chatbot? It may be hard for readers of today to fathom that, but that’s how it was back in 2023 when a then-fledgling OpenAI released ChatGPT v1.

Of course, we have our own problems today, but studying how humans have - at least to some extent - had their collective immune system kick in - should give us hope for today.

Our species is 300,000 years old. Technologies come and go. But every wave tests us, and reminds us of our ancient wiring. We’re still very much operating with the same brains as we did when we got out of those caves 300,000 years ago.