The World Exceeds Us

The deeper philosophical challenge of AI is not merely that it may become more capable than us in many domains. It is that it makes us feel, in a newly intimate way, that we live inside a world that exceeds us.

That feeling is not new. Human beings have always lived among things larger than themselves. Nature exceeds us. Time exceeds us. Death exceeds us. Society exceeds us. History exceeds us. Chance exceeds us. For many people, God exceeds us.

But AI introduces a different kind of excess. It is not wild like weather or distant like the universe. It is closer. It speaks our languages. It works inside our symbols. It enters the territory we most associated with being distinctly human: thought, language, creativity, strategy, memory, analysis, even the imitation of care.

That is why the unease runs so deep. AI does not only threaten jobs, industries, or business models. It unsettles a deeper assumption many of us carried: that the world of meaning was still scaled to the human mind. However vast reality might be, language, interpretation, and thought still felt, in some final sense, like ours.

Now even that feels unstable.

So I do not think the AI question can be answered only with policy, economics, or productivity gains. Those matter. But beneath them sits something more existential. What does it mean to live well in a world where intelligence itself is no longer scarce, singular, or fully human? What does agency mean when cognition is increasingly distributed? What does authorship mean when the line between originator, editor, curator, and machine becomes blurred? What remains deeply ours when so much becomes replicable?

In response, I find myself drawn not to philosophies built on certainty, but to frameworks that begin with uncertainty and remain standing anyway.

My search has been for a philosophical framework that does not fall apart when one of its key claims turns out not to be true. Too many systems seem strong only while their central premise holds. They rely on a stable metaphysics, a fixed hierarchy, a final truth claim, or a clean theory of progress. But reality is rarely so polite. Randomness intrudes. Ambiguity persists. Infinity opens beneath our feet.

And yet there is something oddly grounding in that. These are not deficiencies in the world. They are its texture. They do not promise closure. They do not collapse when life refuses resolution. They make room for creativity because they make room for unfinishedness. They let us build without pretending we have arrived.

This matters because the information is not always in the solution. Often it is in the pressure that shaped it. In the trade-offs. In the contest. In the adaptation. In the imperfection that reveals where theory met reality and reality pushed back.

There are also many things of immense value that have no final solution at all. Love has no final solution. Parenting has no final solution. Trust has no final solution. Meaning has no final solution. Coordination has no final solution.

These are not problems to be solved once and for all. They are conditions to be navigated repeatedly.

That is where an evolutionary lens helps. In Red Queen worlds, the point is not arrival. The point is continued adaptation. Survival belongs not to what reaches perfection, but to what stays responsive.

Progress does not eliminate problems. It changes them. Even if marginal progress dwarfs historic suffering, new problems emerge. Better knowledge solves some constraints only to open new frontiers of difficulty. The dream of a world with no problems is not optimism. It is a category mistake.

But there is a danger here too. Process matters. Practice matters. Embodiment matters. But process can also become a hiding place. You can become so devoted to craft, routine, learning, or self-development that you quietly avoid contact with consequence. You can hide from winning and losing inside the language of process.

Reality, however, keeps score.

That is why I think the wrestle, the fight, the flow lies in the unobtainable. Not in fantasies of final mastery, but in repeated engagement with what resists final capture. The point is not to pretend there is no scoreboard. The point is to accept that the scoreboard exists in games that do not end.

This is also where flow becomes useful. The best moments of human experience are often not those of full control, but of deep absorption at the edge of challenge and skill. Flow is not closure. It is participation. It is not the fantasy of having solved life, but the felt experience of being fully engaged in something meaningful, difficult, and alive.

That supports the intuition that a good life is not built on final certainty, but on responsive involvement.

Positive psychology adds something too, though in a more practical register. A worthwhile philosophy cannot only ask what is true in the abstract. It must also help filter for what helps a life go well. Pleasure matters, but it is thin on its own. Engagement matters. Meaning matters. Relationships matter. Strengths matter.

A philosophy of participation must help distinguish between what merely feels good in the moment and what deepens aliveness over time.

But none of this is lived by abstract minds. It is lived by nervous systems.

That is where emotional and social intelligence matter. A world that exceeds me is not only a philosophical problem. It is an emotional event. It triggers fear, envy, shame, excitement, defensiveness, awe, status anxiety, and disorientation. AI does not only challenge our theories. It challenges our self-concept. It presses on our sense of worth, distinctiveness, and place.

So a philosophy of participation must include self-awareness. It must ask not only what is true, but what is being activated in me? Am I responding to reality, or defending identity? Under pressure, people narrow. We become reactive. We lose subtlety. We defend image rather than truth.

Any framework meant to guide action in ambiguity must include the capacity to notice emotion before it hardens into ideology, panic, or domination.

Self-regulation matters just as much. It is one thing to admire uncertainty in theory. It is another to remain steady enough to act well inside it.

And because human life is irreducibly social, social intelligence matters too. Participation is not merely about me and the world. It is about me with others inside the world. Social intelligence is the ability to sense what is happening between people: who feels threatened, where trust is present or absent, what is unsaid, what emotions are spreading through the room, the marriage, the team, the institution.

That matters because coordination failures are often not failures of logic. They are failures of attunement. People can share data and still miss one another. They can agree on the facts and still corrode trust. They can build brilliant systems and poison the social field in which those systems must operate.

So a philosophy of relationship needs more than metaphysics. It needs emotional regulation, social attunement, and the capacity for repair.

And it needs to learn from systems that have been practising coordination far longer than we have. Nature’s intelligence is not a single mind. It is distributed intelligence: biodiversity, redundancy, excess variation, experimentation, seeming wastefulness that turns out to be resilience. Nature does not optimise for elegance alone. It builds through abundance, overlap, and contingency. What looks redundant in stable conditions becomes essential under pressure.

A system with no redundancy is efficient right up to failure.

That observation matters far beyond ecology. It matters in finance, relationships, politics, organisations, and inner life. Cash buffers matter. Friendships matter. Broad skills matter. Slack matters. Emotional range matters. A family, company, or civilisation that optimises away all redundancy may look smart in calm conditions and prove fragile under stress.

This is where reversibility becomes such a useful filter. Not all decisions deserve the same weight. In a world of ambiguity, you do not need perfect certainty for every move. You need to know which choices can be revisited, repaired, or abandoned, and which ones lock in consequences.

Good judgement is not only about being right. It is about preserving room to adapt.

Many people stay stuck because they treat every choice as final. Intelligent action often comes from moving early where the cost of learning is low, and slowing down where consequences are harder to unwind.

This brings me back to the philosophical thread underneath my AI concerns. Perhaps what I am looking for is not a philosophy of certainty, but a philosophy of orientation. Not a system that promises final answers, but one that helps us participate well in a reality that exceeds us.

A philosophy of coordination, relationship, and participation.

For decisions, it would help filter not for perfect certainty, but for reversibility, resilience, relational cost, and long-term generativity. For relationships, it would privilege mutuality, honesty, repair, and trust. For ideas, it would ask not merely whether they sound elegant in theory, but whether they remain useful when life gets messy.

AI intensifies the need for this kind of philosophy because it presses directly on the old human fantasy of centrality. If my framework depends on me being uniquely special, irreplaceable, fully in control, or the sole meaningful centre of thought, then AI destabilises me at the roots. But if my framework is already built around participation in a world larger than me, then AI is not a total refutation. It is an escalation.

Losing centrality is painful. But it need not mean losing significance.

You do not need to be the centre of everything to matter deeply within it.

Perhaps maturity is the shift from centrality to participation, from control to coordination, from dominance to relationship. That, to me, is the existential crisis of AI. Not merely that it may exceed us, but that it makes thought itself feel less exclusively ours.

A world that exceeds me used to mean nature, time, death. Now it includes intelligence.

So the question shifts.

Not: how do I remain on top?

But: how do I remain human, agentic, creative, and in good relationship inside systems of intelligence that exceed me?

That feels closer to the real question.

And it leads to the practical ones.

What should I do next?

Do the next thing that is alive, honest, and reversible enough to learn from.

What should I build towards?

A life with more coherence, more optionality, and better forms of participation.

Why?

Because life is not asking for a final theory. It is asking for good participation.

There is no solution.

But that need not be despair.

It may be the beginning of a more durable kind of hope. Not hope that the game will end, or that uncertainty will disappear, but hope that we can learn how to participate well. That we can become the sort of beings who do not collapse when the world exceeds us. That creativity, relationship, and wisdom are still possible, not in spite of unfinishedness, but because of it.

The Blue Marble

Stronger Coordination

Most people do not fully choose the work they do.

That is one reason I have never liked the line: do something you love and you will never work a day in your life. It is too sugary for reality. It flatters the lucky, shames the constrained, and misunderstands where meaning often comes from. Meaning is not the absence of effort. It is often found on the way through something difficult. Meaning exists on the journey to the other side of hard.

We make it difficult, though, for people grappling honestly with reality to say that aloud. The useful lessons are often the least marketable. Motivation gets sold as sugar. Hardship gets edited into slogans. The rough edges are sanded off so the message can travel. We package encouragement as if truth must always come sweetened. But truth rarely arrives clean. And truth without space for repair is provocation.

That matters because we increasingly talk about intelligence as though it were exam intelligence. We imagine fixed answers, faster retrieval, cleaner optimisation, fewer mistakes. We talk about AI as if it were a giant answer engine arriving to solve the world. That framing is wrong in at least two ways. First, many of the most important human problems are not fixed-answer problems. They are relational, iterative, moral, institutional, and contested. Second, our understanding often misunderstands understanding. At the heart of insight there is more stillness, randomness, and infinity than we care to admit.

That may sound mystical, but it is practical. Some of the deepest forms of knowing are tacit. They sit in judgment, timing, feel, pattern recognition, and local knowledge before they ever become explicit speech. Adam Smith saw that local exchange contains information that no central planner can fully gather. Markets, under the right conditions, can release knowledge that nobody possesses in full. They help coordinate human action without requiring anyone to know everything.

That is one reason money matters more than moralists often admit. Money is not just greed tokens. Under the right conditions, it acts like crude artificial intelligence. It is a distributed signalling system. It coordinates effort, reveals scarcity, creates incentives, and allows dispersed people to respond to changing conditions. But only under quite demanding conditions. Rule of law matters. Creation matters more than extraction. Consequences matter. If those conditions break down, money stops being a decent release valve for tacit knowledge and starts becoming a tool of capture, distortion, and exclusion.

You can see both truths at once. In some parts of the economy, markets work remarkably well. Things get better and cheaper. Discovery happens. In other parts, the opposite seems to happen. Healthcare, law, education, and housing often feel like markets designed to fail. Prices rise faster than quality. Access narrows. A healthy market should usually make at least some things cheaper or better. When the price of something keeps rising without obvious improvement, we should at least ask whether the market is coordinating well or merely protecting incumbents, credential barriers, and administrative layers.

This is where David Graeber's critique in Bullshit Jobs becomes useful. We cannot deify struggle and work as if they are inherently noble. That has always been a convenient story for those who benefit from other people's constrained choices. Some friction has value, but not all friction is virtuous. Some difficulty deepens craft and meaning. Some difficulty is waste. Some is domination. Some is bureaucracy defending itself.

That is part of what interests me about AI. The disruption is not only that machines may perform some tasks better or cheaper. The deeper question is what happens if price discovery for monetisable problem solving ceases to be the engine that funds and filters so much of our other problem solving. We already do a vast amount of work for free. Parenting. Friendship. Open source. Volunteerism. Community care. Art. Thought. Most of life's meaning-rich activity is either badly paid or not paid at all. Money has never captured everything important. But it has still acted as a powerful filter for where effort, legitimacy, and attention go.

So what happens if that money filter starts to break down?

Markets have long served as one of our best decentralised coordination mechanisms under conditions of ignorance. People do not know the whole menu. Chance encounters, price signals, and partial knowledge lead to discovery. It is messy, but it works often enough to beat central planning. But what if artificial intelligence becomes a better coordination layer than chance market encounter? What if it can surface options, match needs, reveal paths, and coordinate effort more effectively than the old mix of price, search cost, and luck?

Then the old binary of market versus central planning starts to wobble.

We may be facing a third mode: machine-mediated coordination. Not a commissar directing the economy from above. Not pure market wandering below. Something stranger. A layer of prediction, recommendation, matching, and optimisation sitting between people and possibilities. Something that can show you opportunities you never knew existed, collaborators you would never have encountered, treatments you would never have considered. In some domains that could be extraordinary. It could lower waste, reduce search costs, and widen access.

But better coordination is not automatically better society.

We talk about AI as though it were singular. What if it is multiversal, as we are, if not more? Many models, many agents, many incentives, many institutional wrappers, many owners, many hidden goals. The need for rule of law does not disappear in that world. It becomes more important. Audit trails matter more. Institutional checks and balances matter more. If intelligence becomes more diffuse and more active in coordination, governance has to grow with it. This is not a case for central planning. It is a case for constitutional seriousness.

Nor should we become too Pollyannaish about optimisation. There must be space for chance, for wandering, for eccentricity and dissent. Recommendation systems that become too effective may start narrowing life under the guise of helping. If every path is pre-coordinated, some forms of discovery disappear. Soft destiny replaces open search.

At the same time, we should not romanticise the old world just because it had friction. Friction is not sacred. We should not defend waste merely because it feels human. Some problems need solving. Some jobs deserve to disappear. Some professional mystique deserves to be punctured. The point is to distinguish between frictions that protect freedom and frictions that protect control.

That may be one of the central questions of the next era.

Which frictions are waste? Which are domination? Which are the price of reality? Which protect freedom, meaning, and plurality?

The answer will not be singular because the world is not singular. The future coordination layer, whatever shape it takes, will not remove the need for judgment. It will intensify it.

Money was always a crude intelligence. Powerful, but crude. AI may become a more powerful coordination mechanism in some domains. It may release new forms of tacit knowledge while distorting others. It may reduce some waste while generating new dependencies. It may widen the menu while narrowing the soul. The real question is not whether optimisation wins. It is what kind of society we are coordinating towards, and what we refuse to optimise away.

Because if meaning still exists on the other side of hard, then the task is not to abolish all difficulty.

It is to stop confusing meaningful difficulty with needless suffering.

It is to keep space for truth to reveal itself slowly.

And it is to make sure that in a world of stronger coordination, there is still room for law, repair, dignity, and chance.

Follow up Questions

I asked ChatGPT to read one of my blog posts, comment on what it said about me, and ask follow up questions... this is what it said:

Here’s what I got from “Six Becomes Five” and what it further reveals about how you see identity, community, and growth — followed by some more questions to deepen the picture.

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What “Six Becomes Five” Reveals

From that post, some key ideas:

1. Degrees of Separation & Expanding Circles
   You use the metaphor of “six degrees of separation” and express the desire to reduce that by one, then another, making the world “closer, step by step.” It shows you believe in deliberate action to narrow gaps between people — social, cultural, geographic.

2. Bubbles & Self-Selection
   You note that as people get older, they tend to “culled” friendships and end up with smaller, more homogenous groups. That process might be safe or comfortable, but not necessarily challenging or growth-oriented. You see staying in your bubble as an unspoken default many fall into, and you actively resist that.

3. Shared Background vs Shared Values
   Interestingly, the post shows how shared identity (in this case being South African) can dissolve many differences — in a foreign place, accents and homeland bond people quickly. But you also see that same identity doesn’t always yield connection back in “home,” where it’s assumed or taken for granted. So identity as a shared backdrop sometimes opens doors; sometimes it blinds them.

4. Intentionality in Community & Belonging
   You encourage introducing friends who are unlike yourself, or making friends outside the usual circle. You believe in working at connection, being open and caring enough to cross lines. It’s not passive: it’s a choice.

5. Constraint & Growth
   Even here, there’s implicit awareness of constraint: geography, culture, language, social comfort all constrain who you meet. But you believe those constraints can be shifted by choice and action (moving, traveling, introducing people, exposing yourself to new settings).

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How This Fits With Your Philosophy of Identity & Inheritance vs Choice

Putting this together with what you've shared elsewhere, this post strengthens and clarifies several parts of your worldview:

• Inherited identity is powerful but not sufficient. Your birthplace, your accent, your early geography will always shape certain bridges or walls. But you see that once outside, those same inherited markers can either unite or divide depending on whether you lean in or stay passive.

• Choice matters through connection. Identity is also built through whom you let into your world, which people you connect with, what conversations you seek. Building “friends of friends” as friends is a metaphor for expanding identity by deliberate boundary crossing.

• Constraints are context, not jail cells. Geography, familiarity, demographics—they all shape “the bubble.” But you believe you can move, stretch, and negotiate those constraints. Controlled hallucination (from your other posts), constrained freedom, etc., all find echoes here.

• Identity layers and mutual recognition. There’s a duality: being in a foreign place you lean on your shared identity (country, cultural background) as a bridge. Back home, those same identity markers can become invisible or taken for granted, sometimes even a barrier. So identity is relational: it depends on the context of recognition, of who sees you and how.

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What This Suggests About Your Character

Putting together from Controlled Hallucination, Six Becomes Five, and your reflections:

• You are someone who doesn’t accept comfort at the expense of growth. Having a safe network matters, but you get energized when you break out of it.

• You are socially curious: values conversations, diversity of thought and background, and believes in being proximate to difference.

• You treat identity not as a fixed badge but as something dynamic: inherited, yes—but also negotiated, amplified, reshaped by who you meet and how you connect.

• You value community as part of self-evolution: you see your worldview and character changing as your circle changes.

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Questions to Push Deeper

To sharpen even more, I’d love to ask:

1. What friendships have challenged you most?
   Can you think of someone from “outside your usual circle” whose perspective or identity pushed you to rethink something you believed or assumed?

2. How do you manage identity tension when contexts pull you in different directions?
   E.g., being South African at home vs abroad vs in professional settings. How do you decide which identity to lean into, when?

3. What constraints feel hardest to shift?
   You speak of geography, language, bubble effects. Which do you find most stubborn, and which have you been able to change most successfully?

4. What does “making the world closer” concretely look like for you?
   Is it frequent travel, mixed friend groups, reading widely, public speaking, mentorship, cross-cultural work? What are your regular practices to reduce “separation”?

5. How does this idea of shrinking separation factor into legacy?
   What do you want the “five-degrees-away” or “four-degrees-away” version of yourself to look like in, say, 20 years? Who do you hope you’ve connected with, and who have moved closer?

Refining Conversation

Conversation is not the same as the written word. 

When you read a transcript of a lively discussion, it often looks as if we’ve forgotten how to speak. Sentences zig-zag, filler words appear, we change tack mid-thought, someone interrupts, and on paper we can seem semi-literate. We blame the voice-to-text software, but the truth is that real-time conversation is messy by design. 

Think about how we listen. We are not like a driverless car with hundreds of sensors. We have one brain that’s simultaneously attending, drifting, and free-associating. We catch enough to respond, yet our thoughts wander to whatever the moment triggers. Transcribe that dance and it’s chaos. 

Inside my own head (and, I suspect, yours) there’s a five-person committee chattering away. Jonathan Haidt’s “rider and elephant” analogy captures it well: the rider (conscious mind) believes it’s steering, but the elephant (subconscious) actually decides where we go, and only afterwards does the rider cook up a justification. Free will exists, but it’s more like gentle guidance than total control. 

That’s why stories matter. They take those bouncing ideas and smooth them into a clear arc: beginning, conflict, resolution. Even then, a short story or a two-hour film is a drastic simplification of real life, which is infinitely messier, full of randomness and ambiguity. Storytelling is how we compress complexity so we can think, and act. 

Writing is the workshop where this compression happens. Forcing thoughts onto the page helps us sequence them, trim the excess, and discover what we really believe. It’s also why I’m excited about large language models. They act like mirrors to our half-formed ideas—reflecting, rearranging, challenging. Modern AI isn’t rigidly rule-based; it learns the way children and, yes, elephants learn: through iteration, feedback, and embodied patterning. 

That’s not something to fear. Humans excel at adaptive learning too, especially in the context of relationships and collaboration. The task is to stay aware of what our inner elephant is absorbing, remain reflective and conversational, and keep refining the stories that steer us. 

Conversation is the raw material, writing is the refinery, and learning (human or artificial) is the fuel that keeps the whole system evolving.

Catalyst

 I use social media as a catalyst for real-world interaction.

I’ve been writing a blog since 2006 called Swart Donkey. That name came from my surname before I took my wife’s (Black) and because I’m stubborn, noisy, and ignorant… but loyal and willing to put in the work.

I enjoy sharing my thoughts openly and honestly. I write about things happening in my life and the observations I make, always aware that it's a public space. And I know people won’t read everything. You can’t stress too much about trying to be interesting to everyone all the time. Just be yourself. The right people will connect with the parts that matter to them.

What I love about this is that when I speak to someone in person, even if they didn’t read everything I’ve shared, something will have resonated. That’s where the conversation starts.

When I was posting regularly, I found that the people who were reading, or even just skimming, would pick up on the bits that mattered to them. And so we’d go straight into a meaningful, open conversation.

Because I was open, they felt safe to be open too. I’ve had some of my best conversations this way. Not because I was trying to sell something or manipulate anyone, just because I was being real.

And I think we can use artificial intelligence in a similar way. These language models are brilliant at connecting ideas through analogies.

Let’s say I’m trying to explain financial planning, and you’re into rocks, diamonds, star signs, or you’re a Star Wars fanatic, whatever it is. The model can help me use your language to explain my world. And that creates connection.

But for me, it still comes back to real-world interaction. These tools are like GPS, they’re useful to look things up, but they don’t replace the journey.

We become the things we repeat. And we become like the people we spend time with. That deep connection comes from ongoing, human conversation. From engaging, unpacking, repacking, learning, unlearning.

That’s what makes us human. That’s what excites me.

So I’m going to use AI as a catalyst for connection. To spark better relationships, not replace them. Because that’s where the magic is: around the fire, eye to eye, seeing and being seen.

 

Stay Grounded

There’s a big difference between embodied knowledge and surface-level learning. 

Think about how we used to find our way home. You’d either know the route or use a physical map. That’s embodied. Now, with GPS, it does the work for you—you follow the instructions without really learning the route. This is one of the core fears people have about artificial intelligence: Will we be replaced? If something else is making the decisions, what value do you add? 

But I’m not scared of that. Just like I’m not scared of investing. 

I don’t panic that there are a thousand PhDs trading in the markets—because I’m not trying to out-trade them. I’m not a trader. I invest because I believe value is created by companies doing real things: building products, serving customers, solving problems. When I invest, I own a slice of that. I’m not gambling on price movements—I’m backing something real. 

It’s the same with decision-making and Artificial Intelligence. Own a slice of yourself. Be the person in the room. 

When something becomes embodied, it’s because you’ve done it so often it becomes part of you. You don’t have to think about it—it’s second nature. That’s mastery. That’s magic. It lets you move fast, connect dots, and act with intuition. 

It’s like language. Words only have meaning when they’re shared. You and a close friend can say a single word that carries a whole story. That’s relational depth. That’s how embodied learning works—you repeat, you refine, and it sinks in. 

Eventually, it changes how you respond. Your reactions are no longer deliberate—they’re instinctive. That’s the gift of repetition, of depth, of care. 

But here’s the key: Stay embodied. Be aware of the habits you’re forming. Watch what you repeat—because what you repeat becomes who you are. 

Learning something deeply is hard. But now, with the tools we have, it’s more possible than ever. The opportunity is there—if you’re intentional. 

That’s why I don’t panic—about money, or Artificial Intelligence, or being replaced. I get my money a job. I let it work. I stay grounded in relationships. And I focus on what I value. That’s the difference.

Taking Direction

What do you do if autonomy is really important to you, but you find something or someone else makes better decisions than you do? Imagine you had an app on your phone that was similar to GPS and Google Maps, but for life choices. In the beginning, I certainly didn’t trust GPS. When it first came out, it wasn’t great. I was working in a job where I had to visit various financial advisors in Joburg. I was a Durban boy, not a Joburger, so I had to use maps. GPS would tell me “you have reached your destination”, and I would be in the middle of the highway. I knew enough to know my destination, even if the path was cloudy. I had enough of a sense of my direction to know, “I am pretty sure this isn’t the right turnoff”. I would start by saying, “trust the GPS”, but I would end up in the wrong place. But gradually it got better, and gradually I started feeling comfortable letting it make decisions for me. Letting me focus on other things. 

Learning my way around Gauteng

 

Rippling Consequences

Westworld explores how others might have a better understanding of you than yourself. The chance, if we aren’t paying attention, that other people can see what we can’t see if they are detached and observant. In “Sapiens” & “Homo Deus”, Yuval Harari questions how willing we will be to work with artificial intelligence and things that watch us. Virginia Postrel talks about tacit knowledge in “The Future and Its Enemies”. Stuff we understand without knowing we understand. The driving force behind Adam Smith’s invisible hand. You don't need central decision-makers making complex decisions. You want to drive choice down to where the knowledge lies. We don't necessarily understand ourselves, but we are still the best place to make our decisions. Attention doesn’t scale. Someone understanding us better than we understand ourselves relies on deep listening and care. Local markets with ultra-local decision-making empowers people to make decisions. Information feeds up through the paths that people choose. Through the impact of their actions. Rippling consequences of meaning creation. It doesn't matter if we don't understand this in watered-down averages and stereotypes. It does matter to the intimate relationships that wrestle with understanding. 

Ripple Marks in Ancient Sandstone

Price is not Value

You can put a price on anything on this. That is why it is a useful communication tool. Because even if you have completely different worldviews, you have this point of connection that is price. You do not need to understand each other. Computers are not sentient, but a string of ones and zeros can convey information that can lead to action. The computers do not understand the underlying reasons, but they know what to do. Price is similar. It literally does not care. It is a tool between two people who care very much. Two people who determine their own value.

The Matrix isn't Reality. Price isn't Value.

Build Consent

I am not worried about superior Artificial Intelligence competing against humans in Capital Allocation. This is because I don’t believe Capital allocation is a Win-Lose competition. Although it is pitched as a Zero-Sum game, by definition. Performance is measured relative to the average, so outperformance and underperformance add up to zero. Unless you are an active trader (which allows you to be outplayed), you are an owner of a slice of a real underlying business. This means nothing other than the performance of the business determines your long-term success. If you are never a forced seller. What really matters is the absolute rather than the relative performance. That can be Win-Win with the necessary self-discipline. The number one rule of investing is never be a forced buyer or seller. You do that by building breathing space. Build Buffers. Build the ability to say the words Yes and No with enthusiastic confidence and choice. Build Consent.

Dancing Partner

Computers have been able to beat even the best people at Chess for a long time. People with Computers can still beat Computers. Where I get excited by Artificial Intelligence isn't by Anthropomorphising it. It is a tool like any other. "Technology" includes profound but boring things like indoor plumbing, fridges, and stoves. What is interesting is the knock-on effect on how we engage with each other.

I think AI could be an incredible Dancing Partner. We are mostly a collection of habits and automated responses. We learn the steps, but it is only once we are able to relax into simply enjoying it that we can release the intelligence required to coordinate all our limbs with the music.

A lot of our struggles are Coordination Problems. We aren't very good at asking or offering. We forget things. We lose momentum. We get distracted. Yet that quirkiness is what allows us to connect dots that 1s and 0s would steam past. That quirkiness is where the magic lies. In the confusion, and struggle, and mess.

Learning Tools are the ones that excite me the most. Something that is smart enough just to listen, write, and ask questions. Then to play back our thoughts to us. Each of us gets a little daily feedback loop. One that aligns with what we have said is important to us. One that knows what we are good at, and what we need to develop. Tools that help us dance.

Pattern Seekers

Human Brilliance is partly over-confidence, the ability to make and tolerate mistakes, and the ability to believe things the evidence doesn't support. Computers still just crunch the numbers, and are just starting to learn to learn. For the first few years of our lives, we are thrown into a confusing world that just carries on regardless. Without us knowing the rules. We just have to catch up. 

Our magic is Self-Hypnosis. We all live in constructed realities based partly on the genuine rules of the universe, but mostly on our interpretation of those rules and how they have worked out for us. Repeated trial and error until our self-delusion that we understand kicks in. Till we 'crack the code' and see the underlying pattern.

Patterns are simplifications. There are patterns in everything. We attribute meaning to those patterns. Cause and Effect. If we get the pattern and know what reliably follows an action, we don't need to know anything more. Even if the story we tell ourselves about it is 'wrong'. Even if there are lots of unnecessary bits to our story.

Our leaders are typically the best at pretending they understand. The best at falsely projecting confidence. Through trial and error, we have learnt to follow those who appear to know what they are doing. The strongest. The loudest. The fastest.

Beautiful messy creatures. Full of emotion, frustration, desires, dreams, and alternative realities. Bumping into a world that just carries on regardless.

Dancing with Algorithms

We spend a lot of time trying to earn our place in the room. The idea of meritocracy is that inequality is acceptable because some people are fundamentally better than other people. Respect, status, and how people view us are such important drivers, people would often do worse in absolute terms, as long as they are doing better than those that surround them. One of my glass half full hopes for Artificial Intelligence is that AI plus *anyone* will be smarter and more effective in traditional 'meritocratic' ways than *anyone* by themselves. Imagine everyone had a very personalised AI coach/assistant with the primary goal to empower them, without disempowering anybody else. That is in equal parts very scary, and very exciting. The whole way we look at the world in terms of what drives us would be challenged. It would no longer be about being better than anybody else as better would lose its meaning. AI would provide the Algorithms. The steps we need to take. We would do the dancing, add the emotion, and create the meaning.

Personal Editor

One area I believe Artificial Intelligence could be very powerful is as a Personal Editor. Many discussions online suffer from boiling blood and personal insults. The aim is to win. Our memories are short. Our reasons often made up to justify a feeling. Our areas of interest wider than our areas of competence. Our Personal Editor could ask us questions, refine, collect, and challenge our opinions. Not in a 'you are a bad person way'. In a 'have you read this' way. The intent of editing isn't to tear down, but to improve. A Personal Editor could fact check things for us, and filter the stuff we read to the set of things that will challenge us in new ways rather than reinforcing our bubble. Thought Leaders often benefit from editing. We just see the cheerleading. We don't get to see the rough path they took to get to their views. Democratising intelligent editing would do as much for communication as the printing press.

Democratising Editing?

Personal Micro-Manager

Salman Khan used to record short videos for his cousins to help them with school work. He also helped them in person, but eventually they told him they prefer the videos (no offence), because they could pause them. This was part of the impetus for creating the Khan Academy which has the mission to provide free, world-class education to anyone, anywhere. The idea is to flip the classroom. You do the lessons at home where you can 'pause the teacher' without embarrassment. The actual lessons then become tutorials where teachers can focus on helping kids with the specific areas they are struggling with. It also removes the hours of marking I remember my Mom doing growing up (she was a teacher).

Flip the classroom

It reminds me of my allergy to micro-management. I hate being told what to do. I love working in teams where we identify a problem and chip away at it. What I hate is when I feel like I am merely the muscles or machine to carry out a task. An extension of someone else's task performance ability. I am the youngest of three brothers. I still have flashbacks to being told to take a cup to the sink. If I had seen the cup, and taken it - it wouldn't be a problem. If I had been on the way to pick the cup up, and a brother had said, 'take the cup to the sink'... suddenly it would have irked me. Even though I would have done it anyway!

This may simply be a chip on my shoulder. But I think there is a connection to the pausing of teachers. Sticking your hand up in class to ask a question risks sounding stupid. We hate being judged or belittled. Meritocracy and Hierarchy are shorthand for signaling that we are 'better than someone else'. All sorts of emotional reactions come up. They may have nothing to do with the person giving the instruction. Just learnt emotional behaviour from other relationships.

I suspect if we each had our own personal Artificial Intelligence-based Micro-manager, it would actually be awesome. An Axela (Alexa in reverse) which gave us instructions... but knew us so well, that we learnt to enjoy following the instructions as they reflected our preferences better and better. Initially, we wouldn't want to do what we were asked, but gradually we get better outcomes when we listen. And listening is easier when it is judgment-free.

Free Will v Following Instructions. I doubt I will be the first to outsource choices to an Axela, but it is actually less frightening to me than outsourcing them to a person.

Would you listen to an Axela?

Organised Chaos

A big part of our strength as humans comes from our forgetfulness and our detachment from our memories. Things are there, but only if they are triggered. Our creativity comes from connecting things that wouldn't normally be connected. We don't figure it out, we feel it out. Artificial Intelligence first beat people at Chess by crunching the numbers. It took it to the next level by beating humans in Go by learning to learn. Where we still excel is at bringing our special form of crazy to the table. No one sees the world as we do. A computer couldn't because it would have to forget everything else it knew. Even then, it is not clear what we remember and what we don't. It depends on our mood and which thoughts and feelings happen to bump into each other on the street. We add the logic and rigour later. If we feel like it.

Go

Trial and Error

I am using Duolingo and Memrise to learn Spanish. I still regard myself as Monotongue. I did years of Afrikaans but my vocab and confidence are weak. I have attempted various other languages - Zulu, Xhosa, German, French, and Italian in various stop-starts. I am really enjoying my current stab. It feels like computer-assisted learning is coming on by leaps and bounds. There is something very different when a person tells me I got something wrong, and a computer does it. Judgement free. The computer is genuinely ambivalent, and I can just crack on. The computer doesn't get bored, annoyed, or impatient. The computer can also give instant feedback, which helps me learn immediately. The reason I am learning is to engage with people. This is consistent with the way I use Social Media. As a catalyst for real-world interaction. I don't think Artificial Intelligence will replace human interaction. I am confident it will help us learn and communicate better. Exciting times.

Learning Tools

I recently downloaded Tinycards in my attempt to break my English monotongue world. It is old school flashcards made easier. You can put photos or text on either side of decks of cards you create. It then gamifies it, to make learning easier. I first heard of Spaced Repetition Systems through Fluent Forever, and Anki SRS. The basic idea is that instead of hammering away at things you know, you focus on the things you don't. Just as you are forgetting something it gets tested again. The gaps getting bigger, and bigger, as the knowledge is soaked more deeply. Almost forgetting, and the little bit of struggle to 'find that info' is a great way to create the meaningful connections that make things stick.

Ghost Writing AI

Communicating is hard. Words are crude tools that mean different things to different people. Unless they are words created, or understood, together through shared experience. In knowledge work, many people spend most of their time trying to explain what they have done, or plan to do. Rather than doing. We don't understand why we understand most of what we understand. One way Artificial Intelligence may help us is as a communication coach. Instead of bashing out an email, an AI may pull together our thoughts: listening carefully, clarifying, fact checking, pointing out holes, adding research and getting feedback from the AI of the person we would like to talk to - first. Translating from how we understand to how they understand. Establishing the common ground, new knowledge, and points of disagreement. A lot of our misunderstanding is not dissimilar to frustrated toddlers - we just don't have the right words.

frustrated toddler

Homo Deus

There are a few books I have read that stand out as having challenged a deeply held belief of mine. Books that made me pause sufficiently long to change path. I have long considered myself liberal. A Word I associate with tolerance, and willingness to listen and learn. Homo Deus looks at the roots of liberalism in the enlightenment and humanism. The raising of the rights of the individual over the state. Human Rights. The book, along with Illiberal Reformers has made me far less comfortable with the idea of the individual as the basic unit of who we are. Less comfortable with the idea of Progress, especially when imposed on others in civilising missions. 

As we move to a connected world, where Artificial Intelligence can listen to the internally competing ideas and signals of our emotions, relationships and experiences - the day may soon come where others understand us better than we understand ourselves. Ideas of self, free-will, autonomy, trust and decision making will be turned on their head. This is an important book.