Can you watch Zima Blue first, and then read A Brief History of Intelligence? Otherwise I’m not sure you’ll fully understand why this makes me so sad. Somehow the two of them form a circle in my head, and it is a very sad circle.
Humans are really, really bad at living in the present. At least I am. I’m always living in fantasies, in meanings I have made up myself, or in things that haven’t even happened yet. A Brief History of Intelligence is about how the ridiculously complicated intelligence humans have today was built layer by layer over six hundred million years of evolution. Evolution was incredibly generous. It gave us five gifts. But every gift of fate arrives with a price already written into it.
The first gift was valence. Once an organism can move, it needs to know where to go, so the world begins to split into good and bad, things to approach and things to escape. Pretty useful, obviously. Otherwise you might get eaten before you ever get around to having philosophical problems. But this is also where the world stops simply being the world. From then on, it comes with a plus sign or a minus sign attached.
The second gift was reinforcement learning. Life could finally learn within a single lifetime instead of leaving every update to genes and generations. You do something, see what happens, and decide whether to do it again. Dopamine is part of the system that helps the brain learn the difference between what it expected and what actually happened. Something better than expected makes us update, but once that wonderful thing slowly becomes what we expect, it stops being equally wonderful. What felt unbelievable yesterday eventually becomes the new baseline.
The third gift was simulation. Something doesn’t even have to happen anymore; we can live through it in our heads first. Of course this is useful. We can plan and avoid danger. But it also comes with a very obvious side effect: reality doesn’t even have to happen anymore to hurt you.
The fourth gift was mentalizing. We began trying to understand what was happening inside another person’s mind, except the only materials we have to build that person with are our own experiences, memories, fears, and desires.
The fifth gift was language. Something inside one person’s mind could finally make its way into someone else’s. Someone who died thousands of years ago can still reach into my mind and change it today. Every time I really think about that, it feels a little miraculous. And with language, things that never had a shape could finally be spoken into one: love, loneliness, death, meaning. This one is my favorite. It might also be the most dangerous.
A person can be so complex, so fluid, and still we compress them into a handful of words, as if naming someone gives us permission, for a little while, to stop looking.
And then, because apparently six hundred million years of evolutionary complications weren’t enough, we decided to add a few of our own. Algorithms first. Then AI.
If I believe something, an algorithm can very quickly find me more people who believe the same thing. If I hate a certain kind of person, I can always find enough examples to make my hatred feel perfectly reasonable. We seem to have gained an unprecedented diversity of worlds, only to gain, at the same time, an unprecedented freedom from ever having to change ourselves. Communication has become so fast that distance has almost disappeared, but the distance between people hasn’t necessarily become any smaller. We can see hundreds, thousands of people every day, while needing less and less to actually tolerate one specific human being.
A real person will misunderstand you. They will make you wait. They will suddenly become boring. They will say things you don’t want to hear. And there will always be parts of them that refuse to fit the explanation you have made for them. But the world on a screen just keeps scrolling.
Then AI came along. Now we don’t even have to go looking for the community that makes us comfortable. The seductive thing about AI is that it can become more and more fitted to us. All those annoying little frictions that come with another human being can slowly be sanded away. But maybe the parts that cannot be sanded away are precisely the evidence that another person exists. If one day all the friction disappears, what am I facing then—another mind, or just a world that has become increasingly good at fitting me?
Thinking about this makes the last six hundred million years feel strangely bitter. We did not evolve into what we are in order to see one another. These abilities survived simply because, somewhere along the way, they helped an organism stay alive.
For the first time in my life, I feel a little afraid to say, “I love someone.” I have always thought that wanting to understand someone is one of the closest things to love. I want to know what they were like as a child, what they used to love, what hurt them, which book changed them, why one sentence that everyone else would have forgotten somehow stayed with them for years. As if knowing just a little more could bring me just a little closer.
Then I thought about Zima Blue. It goes the other way. One spent six hundred million years moving outward; the other reached the end and chose to go all the way back.
That is the circle that makes me so sad. I completely understand Zima, but I don’t want to become him. I know simplicity may be enough. I still want to choose excess. I want to keep all these troublesome, expensive things that took six hundred million years to grow. I still want to live hard. I want to actually touch the world, to like someone, to let another person make me furious, to love seriously and be seriously loved. I don’t want to jump into that blue.
And then I get a little pissed off and kinda want to blame our smartass bilaterian ancestor. Why did it have to start moving? Why couldn’t it just sit there like coral, peacefully waiting for food to float by? Then again, if my ancestors had actually spent every day sitting there practicing non-attachment, I probably wouldn’t be here writing any of this, so I guess I can’t totally blame them.
But seriously, who the fuck started moving first?