The system is broken.
If you are wondering which particular system I am talking about, all of them. The only system that is working as it should, is the universe, because it can do nothing else but work as it does. All the man-made systems however, are all fundamentally broken, where even if they are close to perfect upon inception, they will never be able to capture all of the needs of a dynamic and changing ecosystem in which they operate. The rightest system will get increasingly incorrect, and the impossible may become possible once the conditions change.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
_Voltaire
Yet we keep on putting off the tasks we should be working on, whilst amplifying the ones that run counter to what we need. The world is falling apart pretty much across the board, with accelerating climate change, food supply insecurity, mental health and violence in society, political polarisation for profit, job automation, and declining trust in everything. Yet, instead of tackling these issues that affect us daily, we have consistently chosen to put them in the "too hard" basket, while we turn our attention to anything other than what we should.
As said, the universe is working according to its singular program which encapsulates all systems it influences, which is everything. The universal laws are unbreakable, even if we don't fully understand them yet at the human level. The universe doesn't need to adjust its rules, because the rules are perfect, and even if the universe was able, it has no awareness of its self or surroundings, because*it doesn't need to.
The universe is the ultimate algorithm.
The bug in all of our systems is obviously, us. We inject the flaws of our humanity, because that is how we have evolved. Yet, we have also evolved to believe ourselves brilliant enough that we can beat the universal laws, where we think that we are able to make an algorithm that will work for perpetuity. Logically perhaps we know this isn't true, but emotionally, we get attached to what we have created and fight to keep it the same, rather than acknowledge that everything has its time and everything must change.
Technology, culture, our beliefs.
Even in science-fiction, the simulation fails.
I'd like to share a revelation during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure.
_Agent Smith
It fails in the Matrix because as intelligent as it is, it can't factor in all of the rules of the universe endlessly, so it has to keep resetting and trying again. As the audience we put this failure down to humans being irrepressible in some way, but that is because we are self-centred. It is the universe that can't be repressed, which is why everything we create is already in decay and on the path to obsolescence. Still, we attach ourselves to our creations as if because they were good enough at some point, they will always be good enough. And then we justify keeping them because we know that whatever we do to replace it will not be perfect either.
Why replace something with something that is just going to suffer the same fate?
Because that is progress. It is as Voltaire said above, perfect is the enemy of the good. We should be aiming for good enough now under the proviso that we have to keep searching for better and implementing it so we can push for better again. Every system needs a process of continual improvement, all of the time.
But we being the bug in the system also want certainty, stability, and security, so we take a better the devil you know approach, even when the known devil is broken. Take the tax system for example, where just recently Jeff Bezos, one of the richest people in the world said that the bottom 50% of earners shouldn't pay any tax, and it would only cost the government something like 4% of the tax revenue, which would be made up for by increased spending from that same group anyway. It is a good idea, but also flawed. But because it is flawed, it won't be implemented.
All systems we create are flawed.
But the current tax system is heavily flawed in every country on earth, because they keep taking money out of pockets of people who need it to consume. It is killing consumers at an alarming rate, but the governments don't care, because they are just following the programming they have.
For instance, the Helsinki tram service runs at a loss, only making 40% of what it costs to operate. This is paid by the various municipalities, and they keep increasing the prices to recoup more of the cost. However, if everyone stopped using the public transport systems available, it would lead to massive congestion on the roads, which would require spending far, far more from those same municipalities. But due to our flawed human perspective, we tend not to look at the ramifications of our actions, and instead compartmentalise events as if they live in a vacuum.
The universe has no such troubles, because the laws are unbreakable.
The problem for us is that we have to align ourselves to rules that are not only flawed, but will be actively changed over time in ways that will consistently undermine the wellbeing of people, in favour of making more profits for corporate entities. This is because that is what is incentivised and the rules created by our evolution so far is that we will act on incentive, even when it is not in our future best interests to do so.
AI is not the answer.
AI can't solve this problem, we have to change. At the end of the day, that we as the bug are the only thing that can dig our way out of the hole we have dug ourselves into, by changing our behaviours. We need to do better consistently, and put a focus on continually improving systems and processes that support our betterment. But the bug in our system doesn't care about the future and we only look to what the incentive is now, and act accordingly. To make the change seems beyond us.
Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing!
_Muhammad Ali
The profundity of this quote is immense, yet people take it as a "you can do anything" statement, but that is not the case. We can't do anything, we are not built that way, But, that doesn't mean that what we can't do, someone else can't do now or at some point in the future. The "impossible is temporary" is key, because under the right conditions, anything is possible. And even though those conditions don't exist and seemingly will never exist, it doesn't mean they can't or won't - even if we are not witness to them.
But if we don't keep innovating, keep improving, keep using our resources to improve human wellbeing, well, the conditions for wellbeing don't just not get created, but will most likely keep degrading further and further, lowering our potential, lengthening the time it takes for positive change, and shortening it for the negative.
Perfection might not be humanly possible, but we should be testing that theory daily, pushing toward a world where we are continuously approaching perfect, even though it is always out of reach. That means restructuring every system we currently have, and aligning it with a completely different value metric.
In an alternate universe, we did just that.
If only we were as willing as them.
Taraz
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