Creatures and Machines

Charting the course for 2024

Welcome to New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.

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To Begin

After a brief winter pause, we meet again. It’s great to be back on the trail.

A fascinating year lies ahead, and as always this newsletter will be watching and working to make sense of it all.

I can’t wait. The older I get the more grateful I am for what is fundamental about life: the passing of the seasons, the unfolding of events, the simple ability to bear witness to the world. Even taken alone, it’s all a privilege. To have the time and space to think independently and share my reflections here — that is lucky indeed. So thank you for making it possible.

It’s become customary in the first note of January to review the year just gone for NWSH, and to look out to what’s coming. But this year I have more: a bumper package of reflections to get us all started.

In a few days I’ll send a Lookout to 2024, which covers the key themes and topics on my mind as we look to the year ahead

And after that I’ll send the usual housekeeping instalment, in which I reflect on how NWSH fared last year and where it’s heading next.

But first, in this instalment, I want to offer some thoughts on a handful of core convictions that have coalesced in my head recently. They are overarching ideas about the nature and implications of the ongoing technology revolution. And they’ll do much to shape the course I’d like to chart across the coming 12 months.

So let’s dive in.

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The Next Great Division

Over the Christmas break a single quote has rung in my ears. It was written by Wendell Berry, the great American poet-farmer and environmentalist, in an essay called Life is a Miracle.

In that essay Berry can be found — as he so often could — railing against the all-consuming nature of techno-modernity. Its imperatives, he says, have seeped into every aspect of our lives, leaving us culturally and spiritually bereft. But Berry is aware that not everyone shares his perspective. Some people, he says, are so bound up in The Machine that they take its imperatives — speed, efficiency, and relentless expansion into new frontiers — for their own.

In some deep sense, says Berry, those people want to become machines.

'It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.'

Berry wrote those words in 2000. Almost a quarter of century later, it should be clear to everyone that he was on to something.

Over the last year, I’ve become convinced that we’re starting on a period of epoch-making change. Via machine intelligence we’re amid an acute acceleration of the techno-social process that begun with Newcomen’s steam engine and the first Industrial Revolution.

That process has always chewed up the old and spat out the new. Across the coming years, though, it will do so with increasing and eventually violent speed. The challenge, as far as many will be concerned, will be to conserve recognisably human modes of living and being in the midst of this destabilising change. But not everyone will share that view. Some will want to embrace every part of this transformation, and to live on its new frontiers.

Some will want to be creatures, and some machines.

At the end of this journey lies a strange destination. That is the eventual fusion of we humans with our technology; specifically the fusion of human and machine intelligence of the kind that certain technologists have forecast, including Yuval Harari in his smash hit speculative book Homo Deus.

This newsletter is built around a foundational model of change. It asks us to remember that amid new technologies and the transformations they fuel, we’re still the same old humans, with a basic physiological and cognitive equipment unchanged since the Stone Age. New world, same humans. Human-machine fusion breaks that model. That’s because it’s not just another technology that changes the world; instead it changes us.

Wendell Berry in his study

Again, Berry’s thought about creatures and machines is useful.

For some, the prospect of human-machine intelligence fusion — and projects that usher it closer, such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink — seem an abomination. To others, they are a shot at transcendence.

And now, just as Berry foresaw, conflict between those two parties will grow. You can see prototypes of this conflict taking shape today, via new intellectual currents around technology that are carving a path through Twitter and other social media platforms.

Look at effective accelerationism (e/acc) and its stated determination to accelerate toward superintelligence and human-machine fusion as fast as possible. And look, on the other hand, at the degrowth movement, which says we should put the brakes on techno-modernity and revert to more traditional modes of human existence.

On Twitter and elsewhere, the argument between these two parties grows more acute. In the end, though, there can be no final arbitration, no definitive ruling on who is right. That’s because both sides of this argument are founded in real, equally legitimate, but mutually incompatible dimensions of our shared nature. In each of us there is a part that wants to be be more, to go further, to be infinite. And a part that wants to lean into our creaturely, embodied, and organic selves.

The conflict between these two sides of our nature rages inside each of us. It always has. But now, just as Berry imagined, this conflict is becoming an authentic and practical political issue.

That’s happening now because technology has become the most powerful shaping force in our collective lives. It has become, in so many ways, the central question that we must answer together. And it’s happening, too, because the terminal station is drawing near. Human-machine fusion — which once seemed just a slice of science-fiction — is now a tangible possibility.

Across the coming years conflict between those who want to all-knowing, immortal, and infinite machines and those who want to remain creatures will only grow more acute. Both sides have legitimate, but radically different, views of what it means to be a fully realised human being.

We are going to need new ways to manage this conflict. And when human-machine fusion is made real, then this conflict will be nothing less than the central political question. How do these two groups — let’s call them People of the Machine and People of the Earth — live well together?

Right now, we have no answers to this question. Nor do we have compelling answers to many other political questions, less ultimate but still pressing, posed to us by the technology revolution reshaping our shared future. Instead, we are caught between two sets of stories. They are stories of technology-fuelled transcendence told by our Tech Overlords and their acolytes. And stories of collapse into a permanently degraded afterworld, told by those who believe — and sometimes seem even to wish — that such a collapse is imminent.

We need new stories. New visions of what our future can be. And new ways for people with vastly different attitudes towards technology to live together and flourish alongside each other.

And what that demands, in the end, is a new account of ourselves.

Both sides of the machines and creatures division need that account if they are really to make sense of their positions.

Those who see fusion with technology as a route to infinite, all-knowing transcendence must be able to answer two questions. What, in the end, are they transcending towards? And why? On the other hand, those who seek to remain resolutely human, to lean back into our embodied and organic selves, must be able to explain: what is so important, so valuable, about the human anyway?

You can’t answer these questions unless you have an account of what we humans really are. And of the relationship we have, at the deepest level, to the cosmos we find ourselves in.

The old religions once supplied such an account. For many inhabitants of modernity, the scientific revolution dismantled it. Now we must build anew. That, in the end, is the demand this new world makes of us.

And it’s the demand that I want to address in much of my writing this year. In the end, these questions are partly about technology itself; they ask us to develop our understanding of the nature and implications of the technologies now emerging. They’re partly political, because they are about how about how best to arrange our collective lives. But they’re also something else. As Wendell Berry intuitively recognised, they are spiritual questions, because they are about the ultimate nature and purpose of we human beings.

I want to understand these questions more deeply, and frame responses. And I want to think more about where I stand when it comes to this Great Division between People of the Machine and People of the Earth.

I’ll be doing all that via essays, shorter notes, and interviews. And these ideas will form the backbone of a broader project that I can’t wait to tell you about.

It seems hubristic — absurd even — to approach questions such as these in a little Substack newsletter about technology and the future. Failure is priced in from the start. All I’ll be able to offer are partial, subjective, and incomplete responses. I’ll rely, for those, on a range of other thinkers and writers who addressed these questions in their own times. And insofar as I find any answers, they are sure only to raise more questions.

But that, in the end, is all any of us can muster. It’s all we’ve got.

We are, for now at least, still finite. We’re limited and fragile, capable of seeing a little way ahead at times, but more often than not cast into utter darkness. And it’s with those limited capacities, and mindful of our own fragility, that we must face the new world we find ourselves in.

So let’s go on, step by step, and make whatever sense of it we can.

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What We Need is Here

Thanks for reading this instalment.

And watch out for the Lookout to 2024, which will hit your inbox in the next few days.

In the meantime if the questions I’ve raised here — and the journey we’ll take to respond to them — intrigue you, then consider sharing this instalment with a friend or colleague who’d like to walk this trail with us.

Just forward the email, or hit the button below to share to one of your social networks. The larger and more diverse our community becomes, the better for all of us here.

I’ll be back in a few days. Until then, be well,

David.