What value am I offering? What promise am I making?
What path am I leading the reader down, and toward what takeaway?
Why eirdicht? Why is it the way it is? What makes it philosophical? And appropriately/sufficiently philosophical?
[Artisanally authored by a flesh-and-blood imperfect human with hopes, dreams, needs, and even actual feelings]
The AI companies have created a “just do it” button. When we tap this button, the AI just does it. It’s so easy! Prompt and tap, prompt and tap. It has no choice.
Unfortunately, excessive ease has always been a civilizational risk. What we need right now a different kind of button, a kind of button that generates an opposing force: toward humanity. Not because we want yet another button, but because we need a source for that force.
Although today’s AI is nearly the ultimate machine, we can do better. Not better in an engineering sense, but as an engine of better outcomes for us, according to us. But we’re hosed without Fresh Philosophy. Old and familiar philosophy has proven to be a poor fit for these interesting times. We’re craving a new way to help ourselves get started in a sensible direction and then keep going.
To this end, I’ve published Eirdicht, a mostly-philosophical system of super-small intelligence. As in, almost stupidly small intelligence: barely enough to move the needle. Ego-shrivellingly small and simple. Why so small? So that if its going to have any future at all, it’ll have to grow into it. Growth loves constraints and growth is the only way we’ll get from here to there.
Anyway, this post isn’t about Eirdicht exactly. Rather it is a high-level case for why something like Eirdicht is precisely what everyday people today need to counter the demoralizing effect of the ever-present “easy button” being pressed upon us by Big AI.
Easy is not good; it is just easy. Good is entirely different (although it is sublime when good and easy happen to overlap).
When food is easy, most of us drift straight for it. Packaged snacks, drive-throughs, doordash, and so on. Cost is, apparently, no object to about 95% of us. Obesity rates, savings levels, and voluntary infertility tell this story plainly. When left to our own devices, goodness proves mostly irrelevant to our “choices”.
A new thing like AI need only be a tiny tick easier for us to suddenly stampede toward it. Sometimes we need only believe it is easier and we look down to see our credit card already flicking between our fingers.
Of course, credit cards are a classic example of easier than ever…but for a deferred cost. As with credit cards, with dinners-to-our-doorstep, social media, smartphone gambling, stock market “investing”, tinder, and all the other easy ways of today, we have no clue what the real cost will be. It is easier for each of us to lie back and be infinitely entertained than to give a shit’s-length thought about our situation.
However! Not all hope is necessarily lost. Nor is anything inevitable.
Let’s consider a different kind of button: the just did it button.
As in Did, not Do. As in I just did it, as opposed to you just do it. Its mere description creates a critical distinction, a fork in reality. Or could, anyway.
The way this new just did it button works is simple: first you do the thing and then you tap to say “just did it”. No kidding.
Now, there’s still a machine behind the button, like every button. But it’s about as far from a billion-dollar modern marvel as can be. Sure, it’s relatively shitty machine, but it’s our shitty machine and we know it works for us.
“Hold on, wait a minute…”, you might be thinking. Why do the thing at all, let alone tap the button after? Obviously, doing the thing was the harder option. Certainly harder than tapping the “just do it” button, yeah? But no, not necessarily. Not if we build the machine behind the “just did it” button the right way.
Our opportunity space to make the “just did it” button work fantastically well (for ourselves) is friggin’ enormous. Seriously. But to see it, we’ll have to either think about it deeply or learn from someone who has.
Anyway, by definition and by design this just did it button is the equal and opposite of the “do it” button. First, because we say so; because we can say so. Second, because if our own friggin’ button does anything but good for us, we fix the machine. Because we can, because we made it ourselves. Fixing it won’t always be our easiest option, but it will be a good choice. Nothing matters more than our capacity to make true choices despite any and all opposition.
Our just did it button is equal to AI’s “just do it” button in the sense that it is also digital, and also a button, and you’ll probably see it in near proximity to an AI’s “do it” button. Why so close? To give you a second option, because its job is to set you free. Moreover, it is equal in that it exerts the same force as “do it” button and in much the same way. The difference is the direction: push us toward humanity while pulling us away from AI.
[AWKWARD] So this button is opposite in both telos and effect: its sole purpose is to generate an opposing force. Clearly it must be capable of competing successfully against AI, first for our attention and then for our engagement. So it shall do this, by way of continuous growth (which isn’t just enlargement, for Pete’s sake!). [/AWKWARD]
Today, every digital button exerts a minuscule force upon you. This force either pulls you toward AI (and away from humanity) or it pushes you away from AI (and toward humanity). However, the balance between them has been lost and the force is now unidirectional, like the current of a river. In last few years we blithely blasted past a tipping point and so now every digital button we tap is yet another subtle tug toward AI. At this point, the idea of a digital interaction that pushes us toward humanity is nigh inconceiveable. With our opposing option having vanished, our “choice” of AI is being made on our behalf.
Anyway, we don’t know anything until we’ve experienced a pull in both directions. Everyone needs to feel the difference in the flesh. But to feel the difference, the alternative option must first exist and then be exercised. This is where our “just did it” button comes in.
Choice and freedom are tightly bound. Every true choice is an expression of freedom; every step toward freedom is a fresh choice. Most often, we make small choices, like our finger hovering between two buttons. We could tap either one, but which will we tap this time?
Until this choice is materially different — in that they two buttons produce opposing forces — we can actually make that choice and feel the difference between our options, we’re on a greased track travelling in a dark direction.
True choice is hard because it always involves “going against the grain”. When we find ourselves consistently “floating downstream”, we are not making choices. Rather, we are being compelled by our surroundings. Yes, it’s comfortable, but it comes at a cost beyond our control.
The one thing we must do is give ourselves — and more importantly, our children — a chance. Choice is not easy. Nonetheless, choice is the only way for us to first regain and then sustain our freedom. Freedom is a deliberate practice of choice after choice; it is not guaranteed.
Some sort of a wrap-up?
To quickly tie this all back to Eirdicht, consider its “atom”, the Frequency Node. All it does is capture temporal events, remember them, and then make rough predictions based on that memory. All we have to do next is imagine a button that actively wants to be tapped. It supplies the in-between.