Everything Is F*cked

We Are Bad Algorithms
Here’s one last way to look at the history of the world:
The difference between life and stuff is that life is stuff that self-replicates.
Life  is  made  out  of  cells  and  DNA  that  spawn  more  and  more  copies  of
themselves.
Over the course of hundreds of millions of years, some of these primordial
life  forms  developed  feedback  mechanisms  to  better  reproduce  themselves.
An  early  protozoon  might  evolve  little  sensors  on  its  membrane  to  better
detect amino acids by which to replicate more copies of itself, thus giving it
an  advantage  over  other  single-cell  organisms.  But  then  maybe  some  other
single-cell organism develops a way to “trick” other little amoeba-like things’
sensors,  thus  interfering  with  their  ability  to  find  food,  and  giving  itself  an
advantage.
Basically, there’s been a biological arms race going on since the beginning
of  forever.  This  little  single-cell  thing  develops  a  cool  strategy  to  get  more
material to replicate itself than do other single-cell organisms, and therefore it
wins the resources and reproduces more. Then another little single-cell thing
evolves  and  has  an  even  better  strategy  for  getting  food,  and  it  proliferates.
This  continues,  on  and  on,  for  billions  of  years,  and  pretty  soon  you  have
lizards  that  can  camouflage  their  skin  and  monkeys  that  can  fake  animal
sounds and awkward middle-aged divorced men spending all their money on

---

bright  red  Chevy  Camaros  even  though  they  can’t  really  afford  them—all
because it promotes their survival and ability to reproduce.
This is the story of evolution—survival of the fittest and all that.
But you could also look at it a different way. You could call it “survival of
the best information processing.”
Okay, not as catchy, perhaps, but it actually might be more accurate.
See,  that  amoeba  that  evolves  sensors  on  its  membrane  to  better  detect
amino acids—that is, at its core, a form of information processing. It is better
able than other organisms to detect the facts of its environment. And because
it  developed  a  better  way  to  process  information  than  other  blobby  cell-like
things, it won the evolutionary game and spread its genes.
Similarly, the lizard that can camouflage its skin—that, too, has evolved a
way to manipulate visual information to trick predators into ignoring it. Same
story  with  the  monkeys  faking  animal  noises.  Same  deal  with  the  desperate
middle-aged dude and his Camaro (or maybe not).
Evolution rewards the most powerful creatures, and power is determined
by  the  ability  to  access,  harness,  and  manipulate  information  effectively.  A
lion  can  hear  its  prey  over  a  mile  away.  A  buzzard  can  see  a  rat  from  an
altitude of three thousand feet. Whales develop their own personal songs and
can  communicate  up  to  a  hundred  miles  away  from  each  other  while
underwater.  These  are  all  examples  of  exceptional  information-processing
capabilities,  and  that  ability  to  receive  and  process  information  is  linked  to
these creatures’ ability to survive and reproduce.
Physically, humans are pretty unexceptional. We are weak, slow, and frail,
and we tire easily.
11
But we are nature’s ultimate information processors. We
are  the  only  species  that  can  conceptualize  the  past  and  future,  that  can
deduce long chains of cause and effect, that can plan and strategize in abstract
terms,  that  can  build  and  create  and  problem-solve  in  perpetuity.
12
 Out  of
millions  of  years  of  evolution,  the  Thinking  Brain  (Kant’s  sacred  conscious
mind) is what has, in a few short millennia, dominated the entire planet and
called  into  existence  a  vast,  intricate  web  of  production,  technology,  and
networks.
That’s because we are algorithms. Consciousness itself is a vast network
of algorithms and decision trees—algorithms based on values and knowledge
and hope.
Our  algorithms  worked  pretty  well  for  the  first  few  hundred  thousand
years. They worked well on the savannah, when we were hunting bison and
living in small nomadic communities and never met more than thirty people

---

in our entire lives.
But in a globally networked economy of billions of people, stocked with
thousands of nukes and Facebook privacy violations and holographic Michael
Jackson concerts, our algorithms kind of suck. They break down and enter us
into  ever-escalating  cycles  of  conflict  that,  by  the  nature  of  our  algorithms,
can produce no permanent satisfaction, no final peace.
It’s like that brutal advice you sometimes hear, that the only thing all your
fucked-up relationships have in common is you. Well, the only thing that all
the biggest problems in the world have in common is us. Nukes wouldn’t be a
problem  if  there  weren’t  some  dumb  fuck  sitting  there  tempted  to  use  them.
Biochemical  weapons,  climate  change,  endangered  species,  genocide—you
name  it,  none  of  it  was  an  issue  until  we  came  along.
13
 Domestic  violence,
rape, money laundering, fraud—it’s all us.
Life is fundamentally built on algorithms. We just happen to be the most
sophisticated  and  complex  algorithms  nature  has  yet  produced,  the  zenith  of
about one billion years’ worth of evolutionary forces. And now we are on the
cusp of producing algorithms that are exponentially better than we are.
Despite  all  our  accomplishments,  the  human  mind  is  still  incredibly
flawed.  Our  ability  to  process  information  is  hamstrung  by  our  emotional
need to validate ourselves. It is curved inward by our perceptual biases. Our
Thinking  Brain  is  regularly  hijacked  and  kidnapped  by  our  Feeling  Brain’s
incessant  desires—stuffed  in  the  trunk  of  the  Consciousness  Car  and  often
gagged or drugged into incapacitation.
And  as  we’ve  seen,  our  moral  compass  too  frequently  gets  swung  off
course by our inevitable need to generate hope through conflict. As the moral
psychologist Jonathan Haidt put it, “morality binds and blinds.”
14
Our Feeling
Brains are antiquated, outdated software. And while our Thinking Brains are
decent,  they’re  too  slow  and  clunky  to  be  of  much  use  anymore.  Just  ask
Garry Kasparov.
We  are  a  self-hating,  self-destructive  species.
15
 That  is  not  a  moral
statement;  it’s  simply  a  fact.  This  internal  tension  we  all  feel,  all  the  time?
That’s what got us here. It’s what got us to this point. It’s our arms race. And
we’re  about  to  hand  over  the  evolutionary  baton  to  the  defining  information
processors of the next epoch: the machines.
When  Elon  Musk  was  asked  what  the  most  imminent  threats  to  humanity
were, he quickly said there were three: first, wide-scale nuclear war; second,
climate  change—and  then,  before  naming  the  third,  he  fell  silent.  His  face
became sullen. He looked down, deep in thought. When the interviewer asked

---

him,  “What  is  the  third?”  He  smiled  and  said,  “I  just  hope  the  computers
decide to be nice to us.”
There  is  a  lot  of  fear  out  there  that  AI  will  wipe  away  humanity.  Some
suspect  this  might  happen  in  a  dramatic  Terminator  2–type  conflagration.
Others  worry  that  some  machine  will  kill  us  off  by  “accident,”  that  an  AI
designed to innovate better ways to make toothpicks will somehow discover
that harvesting human bodies is the best way.
16
Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking,
and Elon Musk are just a few of the leading thinkers and scientists who have
crapped  their  pants  at  how  rapidly  AI  is  developing  and  how  underprepared
we are as a species for its repercussions.
But  I  think  this  fear  is  a  bit  silly.  For  one,  how  do  you  prepare  for
something that is vastly more intelligent than you are? It’s like training a dog
to play chess against . . . well, Kasparov. No matter how much the dog thinks
and prepares, it’s not going to matter.
More important, the machines’ understanding of good and evil will likely
surpass our own. As I write this, five different genocides are taking place in
the  world.
17
 Seven  hundred  ninety-five  million  people  are  starving  or
undernourished.
18
 By  the  time  you  finish  this  chapter,  more  than  a  hundred
people, just in the United States, will be beaten, abused, or killed by a family
member, in their own home.
19
Are  there  potential  dangers  with  AI?  Sure.  But  morally  speaking,  we’re
throwing rocks inside a glass house here. What do we know about ethics and
the  humane  treatment  of  animals,  the  environment,  and  one  another?  That’s
right: pretty much nothing. When it comes to moral questions, humanity has
historically  flunked  the  test,  over  and  over  again.  Superintelligent  machines
will  likely  come  to  understand  life  and  death,  creation  and  destruction,  on  a
much higher level than we ever could on our own. And the idea that they will
exterminate us for the simple fact that we aren’t as productive as we used to
be,  or  that  sometimes  we  can  be  a  nuisance,  I  think,  is  just  projecting  the
worst  aspects  of  our  own  psychology  onto  something  we  don’t  understand
and never will.
Or,  here’s  an  idea:  What  if  technology  advances  to  such  a  degree  that  it
renders individual human consciousness arbitrary? What if consciousness can
be  replicated,  expanded,  and  contracted  at  will?  What  if  removing  all  these
clunky,  inefficient  biological  prisons  we  call  “bodies,”  or  all  these  clunky,
inefficient psychological prisons we call “individual identities,” results in far
more ethical and prosperous outcomes? What if the machines realize we’d be
much  happier  being  freed  from  our  cognitive  prisons  and  having  our
perception of our own identities expanded to include all perceivable reality?

---

What if they think we’re just a bunch of drooling idiots and keep us occupied
with perfect virtual reality porn and amazing pizza until we all die off by our
own mortality?
Who are we to know? And who are we to say?
Nietzsche  wrote  his  books  just  a  couple  of  decades  after  Darwin’s  On  the