Intro

  This is going to be a very long rant. And by the end it's going to get a bit depressing and overdramatic. But also revelatory, I hope. If you think I am going off the rails here, let me know. I would love to hear your arguments.

I have a job now

  I have been trying to get a job for a while now and I just got one. Why did it take so long? Because in just a few years, the market for software developers - and I have to assume almost everything that doesn't require physical presence - has changed dramatically.

  First of all, everything is artificial intelligence now. The various platforms that boast finding either jobs or valuable candidates are all run on machine learning algorithms. You create a profile, they match it with a company profile - like Tinder. If there is something that doesn't fit, you're not getting selected. There are consequences for this: you start using AI to improve (or simply generate them from scratch) your applications. Now an AI screener will filter your AI application.

  And it gets ridiculous really fast. I've heard - so take it as a rumor - that you may get a negative score from an AI algorithm if you used another type of AI to compose your resumé. It's so easy to interpret this as Grok hating ChatGPT or something, but it's probably just a mismatch in alignment.

  This also affects employers. Small companies that don't have the resources to hire HR departments and pay exorbitant prices to AI hiring platforms are left in the dark, even when they actually NEED people. And you are looking for a job and can't see them and they can't find you. And if they scrounge up the funds to pay for a job ad, they get so many applicants that they can't handle it without an HR firm.

  So let's say you get past the machine gatekeepers and you reach actual recruiters. They have changed. Just like the Tommyknockers, they approximate the human resources people I was familiar with, but they are different in essential ways. I've had interviews on the phone, for example. They were screening me via audio, using a piece of paper with questions and noting down the answers. I could have typed all of the questions in the computer and answered perfectly. OK, that's the exception. The rule is that you talk to them via some sort of remote video application like Zoom or Teams or something like that. I'll get back to this..

  If you get past them, you get to some technical folks, also via remote video link. The interviews are using web applications to share your coding abilities - or whatever abilities you are being hired for. Enter artificial intelligence again. There are tools that listen to the audio, look at the screen and overlay the answers while you are innocently looking into the screen and doing your exercises or talking to the people there. It's insane! The people interviewing you, not only do they have to stop doing whatever they are trained and willing to do, but now they have to contend with hiring interviews and tools like these!

  It's worse, because this part of technical interviews has NOT changed. They still don't have a clue on how to test for technical skills or intelligence or resilience. And I am not saying it with malice, I've been on the other side, too. It's impossible to discern if a candidate is any good. You can, occasionally, determine they are really bad, but even that is murky, because they could be stressed or they might not ever have thought about the simple question you are asking them and suddenly they are in a panic. I was in a panic A LOT. You know, questions like what are the value types and what are the reference ones in .NET? I do know them, it's just that when I was asked my mind went blank! Wait, are strings reference? I know they are, but underneath they have an array of characters ending with a zero and they are immutable. Why IS that a reference type? Why is an object a reference type, but then a value type is inheriting the object?! Needless to say, it's not a good idea to have philosophical dilemmas about the basics of your coding language when you claim 20 years of experience in it. But that's what happens! And the interview that I did pass, I would not have hired myself if I were them, but somehow it happened.

  And don't get me started on the question I despise the most: "Tell me about a project you were proud of". Like you get hired to make your own projects, design them, change them as you want, and they are also so technically and conceptually interesting that they could be used to prove your prowess as a software developer and generate pride. "Oh, yes, let me tell you about the high performance massively distributed microservice application I designed, wrote and published while I was changing the color of the Submit button I was asked to". Fuck that question!

  OK, let's say that you get through all of this stuff: you survived the AI gauntlet and you were among the ones out of more than 100 applicants that were passed to a recruiter, the recruiter liked you and arranged a technical interview or two. You passed that with flying colors or with luck or by shamelessly cheating. You perfectly described the project you are proud of, or maybe a non existent perfect project for a company that in reality asked you to fix bugs in a VB.Net application they bought for the customer base it had in India.

  You then get to some sort of thought police interview, trying to test if you are a fit with "the company values". This basically means if they like you or not - and in the sad cases, if you say the right things in the right way. And how does this happen? Yes, via a remote video thing. If the camera does not like you, you're screwed. Right after you have proven you are actually good at what you do! Of course, the reverse is also possible and even probable. You finally get to meet the person you will be working under and if you feel it will not work, it's best you don't go through it.

  A question remains... why did you go through grueling technical interviews and why did the technical people have to go through them to interview you, only to then get to the manager or local HR overlord and get the stink eye? Because in the before times, when you were looking for a job, you sat across someone, you actually shook hands, communicated via verbal and non verbal language and in the end you felt connected to another human being. You understood more of who that person was and cared less of what that person was.

  But you're cool under pressure, you say exactly the right things, nicely translated to corporatese, and you get the job!!!!! Congratulations! You finally get to shake on it. But wait, you can't shake on it, because you do the entire contract negotiation, signing, etc. via... a remove video thing. That's what gave me the Tommyknockers vibe: there is an entire generation of human resources people (because they are young and have had a career of a few years which they started after Covid) who have almost NEVER met the people they are interviewing. Can you imagine that? You literally hire a ghost in the machine.

  For this job I got now, I am yet to meet a living being. I asked where the office was and they were like "well, set up your machine, then come to the office". That's backwards! It's absolutely normal to go to the office, try to set up your machine, fail, bother some colleague about it who will resent it terribly, but then you take them out for beers and it's all water under the bridge and you gained a friend. That's how humans are supposed to work.

  But there is more. Apparently, this method of "plug'n'play employees" has become a national security issue. Malicious agents are a lot more motivated, trained and have a lot better resources to get hired than the regular guy. You hire someone and you just game a way in to a hacker collective. Even when things are not going to that extreme, you get the employee who works remotely at multiple companies. I mean, why not? That's the dream, no? Compress all the work as efficiently as possible in the time you have got. But that leads to people who don't act like people. They don't collaborate, they do the minimum required and then clock off, they don't work inside a team because there is no team, just a "harness". And who can blame them? They have been treated like interchangeable components of the machine, why shouldn't they be acting like machine components?

Becoming Tommyknockers

  And finally, when the improbable happened and both employee and company are happy with the arrangement and it all works fine, you get the AI meddling again. Because you don't just work now, you are assisted by artificially intelligent agents that do the menial dirty work and let you enjoy the privilege of... managing AI agents. You don't write code anymore, you write complicated collections of rules written in English so that your agents do not royally fuck anything up when they write .NET code, don't accidentally delete production databases or just hallucinate solutions that don't actually work. Not only do you not interact with human beings, but you are forcefully integrating with machine agents that work "for you". This actually translates to "learn from you so you can be replaced".

  Oh, no, I am not paranoid and I am not talking about myself here. I have already been partially replaced when the agents are writing code, unit test, run tasks on my machine, create PRs, comment on existing PRs, write emails and so on. No. I am talking about the company, your employer. They buy these expensive models that record everything you do, the way you do it, your needs, your expectations, your desires, then they do it themselves and put you out of business. Even medium to large companies can get stomped upon like that, see the Figma and Stitch situation.

  The bottom line is that all of this is done in the name of efficiency and productivity and empowering creators and even when it comes to that, there are larger consequences. It's not just the 1984 bland sameness of people being turned into cogs in a heartless machine. Human resources people don't meet any humans. Software engineers don't write any code. Managers manage via dashboards and fire people via company chat.

  And it's everywhere. Social unrest is vented in social media. You buy food via an app, brought by a guy who is just cheaper than any automation today, but never gets treated like anything other than an automaton. Presidents preside via information they get from the TV. Reporters are not investigating anything, they are just rehashing the information they get online from somewhere else, usually a corporate garbage shoot to which access is conditioned by compliance. Kids play on their phones and are best friends with AI. Parents are happy for that because they want to doom scroll AI generated content.

  You probably are rolling your eyes at the last paragraph, but it's not the raving of an old man in a new machine world, it's just a reflection of a simple question: where are all the people?! The machines are not replacing us, they are changing us! We become the Tommyknockers and don't even realize it. We are so afraid of being outdone by machines that we declare anything they do is not human and we let them do it, but we get the leftovers! "Of course AIs are not conscious or even intelligent, because they don't feel the existential dread of waking up in the morning, scratch your balls and try very hard to find some combination of food items that would bring any sort of instant gratification. I don't want to write code, I want to be free to be creative to think of solutions to real problems!". If that were even close to true, you wouldn't have been a developer in the first place. I wonder, when machines will inevitably start to exhibit emotions, will we shun emotions altogether and declare we don't need to feel, because machines can do that for us, and better?

  I have been trying to overcome this general feeling of malaise, this sensation that the world is hollow and fake, by meeting with friends, drinking beers, having genuine human interaction and experiences. And when it works, it works! But it's working less and less. The friends I meet are changed as well, we are a little bit more hollow and fake inside, too. Remember the good ole' times when a get together became stale and you knew it because people started telling off topic jokes to pass the time? We don't even get to tell jokes anymore, because they have been replaced by Internet memes. We replaced the awkward joke section with opinion pieces about movies or maybe a book, while we try our best to look like those AI generated images of diverse smiling friends having all the fun in the world.

  Remember music? When was the last time you selected your own music or discovered a brand new artist that made you feel anything? When have you talked to anyone else about new music? I go to bars and I hear the same music from screens where AI generated animations are running. The music may be AI for all I know. It says nothing, it makes me feel nothing, it's just there to fill a sensory void that we have been conditioned to ignore. For decades our lives have had a soundtrack. Go somewhere where it's quiet and you start feeling that something is missing. It's not that you want to listen to some specific music, it's not that you miss your favorite artist. It's just... too quiet.

Conclusion

  The zombie apocalypse is not coming, it has come and gone. We are what's left, the zombies. I sometimes meet people that still live a full life, they hike, they play, they raise children, they are part of passionate communities and so on. I envy the hell out of them. And when I want to join them, I feel like I am failing the interview. "Yes, you can join, but... what are you bringing to the table?" "Hey, I can talk all day about the negative effects of optimizing human society!" "Yeah, no, thanks. Have you watched any good films lately?"

  Where are all the people? I am alone in the room, writing on a keyboard ranting to a text screen. There is no one here.

  When I was a child I was playing with my friends and solemnly declaring that being 40 is terrible and that we would never ever want to reach that age. Now I am 49 and... well, yes, I was a bit right... but now I am considering my next moves in my life. Things like "I've worked so hard so far, now I should enjoy the fruits of that labor" and "Maybe I should switch my career to something completely different" and "People have started a new life at 50 before".

  And it would be easy to dismiss the fanciful exuberance of youth and shrug it off as something from the past if it weren't happening it continuously. The universe, with its wonderful sense of humor, makes me revisit a lot of my past edicts, whether they were positive or negative, and forces me to consider the opposite as true. All the damn time!

  Am I smug about something like having hair on my head, perfect vision, being a good software developer and so on? Hah! God laughs and makes me bald, needing glasses and destroys software as a business in just a few years. I guess with all of those jokes about software developers being gods we had it coming, like poor Nietzsche. Do I dismiss command line tools and npm and Vim and the Linux way of life as masochistic when you have smart tools like Visual Studio that work perfectly with a wonderfully designed .NET ecosystem? Everybody goes Node.js and Python and color terminals. Do I feel pride in my mental sanity? Then... oh, wait, that hasn't happened yet. Or has it?

  In a way, this is something people have praised in stories: the opportunity to rethink your certainty and revisit your beliefs, to learn from life and turn intelligence into wisdom. But it's also such a waste... you get to understand things when you are out of time and energy to do anything with it. Should I become a teacher? It never works. Youngsters don't listen, they need to experience. I've been there, I know, and I was a nerd, not a bad boy. And it's not even the end of the road. Past wisdom routinely gets revealed as hubris, delusion or wishful thinking. Also stupidity.

  I did mentor people and it felt good. Some have even been grateful for it and felt that it helped them on their path in life. Yet every time someone asks me if I am prepared to mentor at a new job I am a bit reluctant. Am I smart enough to teach anyone anything? Will I make or break those people? I am perfectly happy to peer-to-peer knowledge, but a position of authority such as "mentor" feels wrong.

  Do you know I now want to find a job with an office? When everybody was going to the office, I was praising the wonders of working from home and lamenting the lack of such opportunities and how much time one wasted on the commute. Now that so many people do that, and I myself did it for six years, I want back in the office. And not even for the usual reasons people want that (i.e. getting away from their families) but for the sheer pleasure of socializing and being amongst people. If you know me even a little, you should find that extremely amusing.

  I believe people crave a stable identity that is also successful. Yet that almost never happens, especially now, when the world is being pulled from under our collective feet. If you build and cement your principles, you are labeled as stubborn, inflexible, maybe even pigheaded, and that even if those principles do fit reality and bring an advantage. A person who changes their world view as it suits them is "a leaf in the wind", untrustworthy, hypocrite. And in these times of intense polarization, people who have lived enough and were smart enough to gather some wisdom, see both sides, weigh them for pros and cons and think for themselves, those people have become the enemy, the dreaded centrists who can't choose a side and give their lives for the cause.

  Some folk have the great fortune to be born in power and wealth, surrounded by people telling them how wonderful they are and how they are never wrong. They are never forced to grow in any significant way. It's stable, it's successful, but it doesn't work either. The human brain finds a way to feel shitty about life anyway, find drama and conflict, something to complain about or brag for no discernable reason other than to make other people feel worse.

  What good even is wisdom, if all it shows you is that nothing is permanent, very few things if any are even real, that there is no purpose in life but the one you create, that everything has at least two sides that contradict each other without any of them being false and that our efforts are ultimately pointless, even if within our lifetimes they can be heroic and awesome and inspiring as well? It's a complication no one seems to need!

  Is growth supposed to lead to happiness? It doesn't feel fun when one is forced to grow, yet it does feel pleasant when the growing is done. Like sport. I always hated sport. Probably I will have to start doing that.

  As I write this I am looking at my dog. I don't know if he is generally happy, but I've seen him extatic and joyful and sad and determined and lazy and comfortable and anxious and scared. Can he explain why he felt all of those things? Certainly not. Can he think about it later on and decide on better responses? Doesn't seem like it most of the times. He does look regretful when doing some stupid thing, but then that is how people interpret it and he could just fake it. Right now he is sleeping next to me. That's important to him, to be next to me. If I leave for another room he will wake up and follow me, ask to be put on the sofa or whatever, then resume sleeping. My dog doesn't feel karma is a bitch, he doesn't strive to become better or understand the world, he just follows his instincts and emotions and enjoys the hell out of them. He seems content to love and be loved. Is love all we need?

  I know I am not saying anything revolutionary here, it's not even structured thought, it's more of an emotional journaling thing. A lot of other people have examined this better and to no definitive end either. I always thought that we humans are just smart enough to realize how stupid we are. Maybe that's the ultimate cosmic joke, to be pushed to think of problems that we have no ability to solve, feeling dumb while doing it.

  My instincts are telling me I should either wait and do absolutely nothing, or push through and reinvent myself. In other words, wait for the world to make sense again or push to make sense of the world as is. It's hard, because I've had half a century of training for a different life. Also because I am lazy, as a developer should be. In a sense, we've reached the pinnacle of software engineering by designing something that will do all our work for us. We overlazed ourselves. Maybe that's the answer! I should just lazily enjoy the rest of my life... ah, damn it, I am married! 

  Let me tell you a story. The main character is a little boy, poor, abused, low in status. Maybe it's a girl or an office worker or a prostitute or a grizzled cop maybe a princess, it doesn't really matter. At some point or another, their situation changes dramatically. Depending on the genre, they may discover wonderous new worlds, or that they are secretly heirs of some kingdom, or descend into terror and madness. Sometimes they just struggle to survive or chase some McGuffin.

  No matter what happens in the end, the thrill of the story is highest during this stage, where the outcome is uncertain, the status quo has been obliterated and our hero realizes the world is not like they thought it was. Now, you need an outcome to finish the story, but in truth people care about that part only in the interest of closure. You want to know how it ends so you can start something else, perhaps.

  You may have recognized here the classic three act structure in writing, yet this post is not about writing, but about the part of this scenario that is often overlooked. Our character lived in a stable environment that they perceived as "reality". The second act deals with destroying that stability, while the third restores it, albeit in a different state than when the story started. However, from the standpoint of the hero, the original state is no longer real, supplanted by the new one which became the new "reality".

  In order for fiction to work, that reality has to be significantly more positive or negative in order to get that emotional reaction from the consumer, but in real (?) life, these jumps are smaller and less dramatic and they happen constantly. People may get to a point where they reflect on their youth and conclude that they didn't know what was true, while now they do and kind of regret it. The world seems not as good, free, beautiful, hopeful. People may feel they understand the ugly mechanisms underlying "reality", the unchanging, uncaring, Universe 25 rat rules. It's the grumpy old man cliché.

  But if you dig even deeper, the feeling one gets when reaching this apparent stage of enlightenment is the opposite of real. It just feels fake, pointless, mindless. It's that feeling described in The Matrix: You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. When change comes, upending everything, that's when you feel the most real, while desperately clinging to the belief that it is most definitely cannot be.

  It's an amygdala response, a ripple in the fabric of patterns that brains are designed to detect and construct. It's flight or fight. Your whole animal being is poised to answer a perceived threat. That is why, without external pressure, everything tends to settle into something ritualistic and stagnant societally, resistant to change. Yet, we are also designed to avoid boredom, almost above all else. Therein lies the conflict: it doesn't feel real unless it's challenging, threatening. Rational understanding of the way cogs turn in the machine doesn't make a dent in this.

  So here's my point: what if we trust our gut, so to speak, and define reality as the thing that makes us feel real? Objective reality is all good and well when we're doing science and engineering and perhaps economics, but it makes us miserable when applied to our own lives. I am not saying to go to the extreme and reject what's right under your nose - I have the unfortunate opportunity to know people who do that and it is not pretty, but to see what's there and reject its power over us. Yes, the world is shit, but my life isn't. Objective reality is grey and drab, but I will focus on the dream instead. That kind of thing.

  Does it sound like I am selling you one of those self-help inspirational leaflets? I hope it's not that. I am just saying that Calhoun's mice might have thrived if they only imagined a world outside their universe. Totally not there, but worth it. This is not one of those YA concepts where the emotional youths rebel against the establishment, it's an yes, and... kind of idea, while we improvise our path through life. It's La vita è bella, not Sucker Punch and I hope you understand the difference.

  I am writing this while I struggle with my own feelings of unreality about real life. My intellectual brain is trying desperately to make sense of things, while my emotional side is trying to filter out the explanations that don't feel good. Needless to say, that is not working well, and it makes me get that ugly sensation that I've been living in a bubble which once burst exposed "the real world", which is mean and pointless, perhaps inescapable. But what if I choose to accept the world as it is, while at the same time reject that it deserves the crown of "real" or maybe "enough"? What if repeated exposure to events doesn't lead to learning and adaptation, but to an illusory truth efect? We need that fantastical element, that baseless hope, the dreaming, to complete our perception in generating true reality.

  In fact, I have been hearing this a lot more often - which will become ironic after I finish the phrase, but bear with me: once people are exposed to physical face to face experiences they realize the anxiety, outrage and fear they have been constantly feeling was a repeated exposure effect from media. They then conclude that those feelings were not "real". I argue that they could be more real than what could be (somehow?!) objectively determined. I believe we hold more than one reality, depending on the different contexts in our lives, and the importance we assign to each is something that belongs to us. Han Solo shot first, there are four lights, Santa brings presents on Christmas and there is such a thing as work/life balance. All of these things are real because they feel real.

  After writing all this, I see reality as the ground. You can't deny it's there - you're standing on it, but it's your choice what you imagine built on it. That may be the only true choice, the direction of your dreams.

Laziness is priced in

  When I was a kid, playing with Windows 3.11, I quickly found out that network drive sharing was on by default. This means that anyone on your local network could read almost any file in your C: drive unless you did something about it. And also, all of your passwords - including the user and password of your Internet connection - were saved into a single file that was poorly encrypted, so that meant that anyone in your local network, with a silly little program that would crack that file in minutes, could have all of your passwords.

  But I wasn't "a hacker" knowing this anymore than a person would be a thief if they found some money on the ground. Why would the premier operating system on the planet be this dumb? Well, the answer was simple: people didn't really do local networks in the age of the modem, people didn't read the technical documentation of operating systems like I did and people weren't aware of what would be going on to complain about it even if it happened. In reality, anyone connecting to any ISP would have their user and password visible to any other person connecting there. Not only that, but any and all personal files on their computer.

  I like to call this "the price of laziness". If it apparently costs more to fix than to ignore, it will never get fixed. This particular issue was trivial to be solved by any ISP, they just chose not to.

  Remember movies like Hackers or WarGames, where kids were routinely entering secure systems to the chagrin of "the man"? It wasn't because they were smart and cool like in the movies, it was because no one was bothering to protect their clients. Did you know that for more than 20 years the nuclear safety codes for U.S. rockets was 00000000? When something awful happens to you and people knew about the cause of your problem way before you had it, it means just that not enough consequential people had that problem before you that someone would be bothered to fix it.

  And now, when I am NOT a kid, I see the same stupid stuff. The official YouTube TV application is punishing me for every video with tens of seconds of ads every time I start one and sometimes smack in its middle anyway. But if you close the video two or three times, it just goes through. This only means they calculated the price of the average person watching videos pressing Back and OK a few times is larger than the price it takes them to passively endure minutes of ads.

  One might say that in this case everybody's happy: Google reports people have watched the ads, smart people get around them, lazy people don't, money flows. But there are people who are paying for those ads to be displayed and even if I find no real sympathy for them, their service provider should!

  Same thing with JavaScript paywalls on major news websites. You open one article or two and they slap you with "You've read the last free article for today". Or... you could just disable JavaScript for the site and read ALL of their articles. And I know there is a feeling of smugness when you do this, but again, it was right there. No one actually cared enough to prevent you to read the article! The SEO score was more important. Most people are paying.

  Piracy is the perfect example. There are today simple ways of watching any movie or series, listening to any song, reading any book, without paying a dime. And while authors are crying about it, no one actually does anything because most people find those ways more complicated than paying tens of dollars monthly for streaming services. Streaming services that will increase the price or bring back ads for the cheap tiers or cancel any show as long as they got people excited enough to subscribe to the service with the first season and so on. There was a time when streaming was considered "the solution to piracy" because piracy dropped sharply once people had a comfortable experience devoid of guilt and priced reasonably. But piracy went back up, because the price did not stay reasonable and the experience got increasingly less comfortable as corporations felt they had you locked in.

  In all the companies I worked for as a software developer, I was routinely denied when trying to fix bugs if "it wasn't planned". So when you use some software or app or web site and it fails in the most stupid ways, remember to not curse the developers, they actually wanted to solve those issues, in their free time, and were denied because there was no money in it!

And then they blame you

  This post is not about software or the Internet, it's about everything! The curse of "Good enough" is what led us to this. The laws that only work for some, the way everything seems to get more and more complicated by the day for no reason, the "security" that everyone shoves does your throat even if you don't want it, because they need your data or identity or shopping patterns, the sad predatory state of human relations. Ah, it's good enough! What could possibly go wrong?

  But it gets worse. When people inevitably start taking advantage of these blatant holes, the answer of the authorities is to heavily punish the people that do it rather than the people that leave those in. That's why when I was a kid I could find tons of documentation on how to do all kind of fun stuff in libraries maintained by groups of dedicated people, but then you just couldn't, because it had become very very illegal. That meant that yes, it was harder to find the simple ways in which you could circumvent systems, but also that it was a lot harder to train to harden systems. If you meet security experts nowadays, they are all paranoid as fuck, not only because they know how easy it is to get somewhere and cause harm, but of how random and stupid authorities treat people with such knowledge.

  It had become routine for companies that are approached by people who found security holes in their systems to sue them for hacking, rather than thank them, reward them and fix the hole. And even if it's evil, it's also partially understandable, because in the idiotic legal systems of today, rewarding someone for finding a security hole means admitting you had one, so you can be sued!

  If Hackers and WarGames were pure entertaining fantasies, something like Takedown - also heavily dramatized - is closer to the truth. There is a scene where the hacker laments that he could do any number of evil deeds, crash systems, steal millions, but he choses not to, yet all law enforcement is after him. Ironically, the movie is based on the demonstrably self-aggrandizing book written by the guy who caught Kevin Mitnick, not on Kevin Mitnick's book.

Other thoughts

  I wrote this post because I remembered the Takedown movie, perhaps Skeet Ulrich's best role ever. Mitnick was a slightly annoying personality for me, but I was sad to hear he died of pancreatic cancer three years ago.

  For a long time I thought of how to create a web site that would allow people to pay for what they stole, if that thing turned to be as good as advertised and people would afford it. For example you would download a movie off the Internet, watch it, enjoy it, then go and pay the company anything for the movie. If someone would get to sue you for pirating content, you could use proof of that payment to justify a reduced punishment. But of course it wouldn't work. Who would be stupid enough to declare they have stolen something knowing full well that some asshole would find a way to use that against them?

  But maybe it would work as a kind of donation system, a delayed Kickstarter, where you just send a tip of appreciation to authors. But it doesn't work like that, either. You would want to send the money to the author of the book you liked, not to the publishing house which essentially owns the book. They would immediately find a way to stop or leech off the money you send like that.

  And final nail in the coffin (quoting ChatGPT here) "Financial systems generally require consent and identification on the recipient side. There’s no standard “send money to this person by name only” system for privacy, fraud, and compliance reasons."

  In conclusion, you pay for "just good enough" and get worse, you are villainized for finding ways to abuse that, even if you don't actually use them and report them for fixing and trying to retroactively fix/pay for your abuse doesn't work either. Meanwhile anything better than "good enough" is altered to be more expensive until it becomes "good enough for what I am paying". Some might call it equilibrium of demand and offer, I call it paying to stay lazy.

Intro

I am sure you have heard of Universal Basic Income (UBI), the idea that every citizen should receive a monthly payment, regardless of any employment, effort or role in society. For obvious reasons, it has its detractors, but also it represents a simple and equitable way of providing to even the poorest of us.

I don't want to get into UBI itself, there are a lot of smarter people debating it, but the discussions about it flare up every time new developments in automation happen. If people are replaced by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robots, then it's easier to imagine a post scarcity civilization where machines do the work and humans enjoy the rewards. Human nature, though, makes this hard to conceive.

But what if ubiquitous AI and robots logically lead to the same ultimate outcome regardless?

The shareholder market

In today's Western capitalism it's common to invest in shares or other financial instruments which abstract participation in wealth creation. Instead of creating your own business, working for one or partnering with someone for one, you just buy a piece of an existing business and you get to own a part of its future profits, if any. What does this sound like to you? There is a non-human entity - the business - that does the work and you - the human - enjoy the rewards.

Now imagine you have an AI that you run from home. You install it on your computer and you give it access, configure some skills, give it some money, then tell it to make more of it. You will own its future profits, if any. It's exactly the same thing.

With smart machines, what we now call "passive income" is the only type of income we will get to have.

AI capital

Running the hypothetical AI to generate profits makes you a shareholder in the AI. As long as you own a computing device and have the resources to run a truly intelligent AI on it, you don't have to work anymore.

You don't need to run the AI yourself, you can buy shares from the company that does run it, or you can split the ownership between multiple people. It then gets complicated when any of those people may be themselves artificial. It leads to an interconnected network of people and machines, ownership, control and work that has only one purpose: reduce human effort and maximize returns.

This is just UBI with a different name. Instead of society assigning everyone a piece of the pie, some other entity does it, an AI, a company, a corporation, a group, a relative, another machine, and so on. To me this is the logical, almost inevitable, outcome. Have you ever heard the proverb "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." ? Now imagine its corporate version: "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Give a man a share of a fishing business, and it feeds him for a lifetime."

And yes, some people will have more and some people will have a lot less, but when the entire thing dwarfs human scale and understanding, it will not matter that much.

The end

I've written a lot more on this until I decided to delete it. But you can take this idea further for yourself. In a sense, eternal heaven feels almost inevitable, but at the same time there is nothing for people to do in it anymore - it's also hell. You will get tired of games, cyclical fashion and never ending sexual orgies soon enough. Disease, aging and maybe even death will lose all meaning. We will get worlds of our own where we can do anything we choose.

The funniest thing of all this is that the same mechanisms that make some people want to take control from you, own you, grab everything for themselves are the ones that will slow this process down. Maybe before we all get there, some asshole is going to blow it all up out of spite or incompetence. There will be people who will not get to control any resource generating machine and have no say in what happens. Their suffering will stain our legacy forever, give us another round of strong feeling, meaning and direction, but ultimately it will slightly slow down the final result.

Just like we toil today in thankless workplaces just to make ends meet, then get home to some animal that is ecstatic to see us and will make us smile and give us a sense of meaning, I think machines will take that role, leaving us the only remaining option: being the pet.

  For a long time, the narrative of the human race was space exploration and expansion, a story usually predicated by a total globalization event that turned us all from warrying tribes into one planetary nation or rather race. However, they always kind of skip over this. Star Trek did a decent job explaining a devastating global war followed by a first contact with the Vulcans, but most of the books and TV series and film franchises just assume that somehow we just forget about millennia long national concepts and unite.

  I won't discuss the validity of this idea, let's just say I am skeptical, but I want to first contrast it against another concept, one that seems to be the exact opposite. But is it? I am talking about stories like Silo, Fallout, Metro 2033 and so many others that go the other direction: after a devastating conflict, the world is fractured instead of united, leading to very different groups of people. True, this is mostly related to stories about terrible apocalyptic events from which humanity has never recovered. Because, the idea goes, to be recovered, humanity needs to rekindle civilization and reunite, presumably towards its final goal of space exploration and expansion.

  Yet, when you think about it, the two stories quickly seem to blend together. The united federation of humans often meets alien races, with which they enter in complex relationships of either conflict or cooperation. These stories usually also contain very diversified groups of people which work together, each using their special skills, for the better of the team. Lift a bit to view the story from a little higher and you get diverse cultures engaged with each other, often interested by the same resources. Go lower, into group dynamics, and you find the same pattern. Similarly, with the stories of tribes of people who get separated and thus grow different, there is always some moment of contact, where either the main characters or the tribes as a whole have to meet with other cultures.

   Neither of these opposing patterns, which in the end converge, seem to ultimately accept the concept of cultural unification. They reject one culture being superior to another, even when trying to somehow separate the good guys from the bad based on how similar their principles are to the people writing the story and those consuming it. I postulate that there has to be more to this than just a simple reflection of our species' tribalism.

   Believe it or not, this series of thoughts started from something John Hands said in his book Cosmosapiens, when he was criticizing the theories trying to explain altruism and cooperation. He rightly noticed that sometimes animals from a different species were helping out others, with little chance of the same help being reciprocated. And while personally I think that behaviors like altruistic cooperation can stem from a vague desire that someone would reciprocate in the future, just as selflessly and independently from any foreseeable reward, I had another idea. What if there is no simple in-group/out-group logic at work here, but something more subtle, like the uncanny valley? What if this is actually part of most organisms, perhaps even unicellular ones, a sort of peer pressured mechanism of preserving identity?

   Hear me out. When you think wars, who are the sides usually fighting? Neighbors. You don't ask your neighbor "hey, man, I need resources. Can you please let me pass through your country and get them from that asshole far from us which has a different religion and culture?". Instead you find something so alien and utterly unsufferable about your neighbor, something that will motivate you to make the significantly smaller effort of attacking them. At the personal level it's the same thing. You don't go out of your way to go into conflicts with unknown people in some other town, instead you fight with your neighbors or relatives or people at work. In most of these cases, they are people very similar to you.

   What if an animal would have no issue helping one from another species or one that is kin and part of the group, but have a strong and instinctual dislike from the one of the same species yet at the very edge of that group? What if the uncanny valley phenomenon, the strong feeling towards things that are very close to something, yet not quite it, like humanoid robots or artificial plants, is a mechanism evolved to keep an identity safe from corruption? You see it in kids, tormenting the one in their own group who is least like most of them, what if the reason species stay stable for so long, only to suddenly turn into another or go extinct, is that the species works collectively, instinctively, against divergence? Only when extreme events allow this divergence does a group break, split into two different entities.

   Let's discuss another formula for science-fiction: the dystopia. Something that usually starts making sense or being enforced by other people who believe it makes sense, only to turn into an oppressive force against self expression and evolution? The solution for this is "the revolution", a word that literally means turn-around or rotation. But isn't it the same story? A group of marginalized and oppressed people, finding the opportunity and resources to break away from the main group, maybe even take over the reigns? Normally the revolutionaries are so similar to their oppressors that they routinely pretend to be one another, the only difference being a subtle divergence of ideology. The larger and more powerful the oppressor, the lower the chance to get free.

   And this is the rub, isn't it? Generalizing - maybe to unhealthy extremes - these stories tell just one: beings naturally attempt to diverge, filling all evolutionary niches, unless their group reigns them in in order to preserve the identity of that group.

   So getting back at the stories of separate and vastly different groups, they are basically a respite, a fantasy escape, from the ideas of globalization, against the tyranny of the vast majority. It's a maybe unconscious revolt against stagnation, a curious attempt to explore what would happen to people if they were allowed to try out things by themselves. Many terrible things, for sure, but the general idea of freedom of expression is a good one. Perhaps the resurgence of this kind of stories just goes to prove there is a strong natural pressure against the arrogant declarations for "the only way" of existing. It's a zeitgeist thing.

   A long time ago I was a strong believer in globalization, in the abolition of borders. They seemed idiotic to me. Why would you separate the intelligent beings on this world with abstract and artificial walls? What is the point? Wouldn't it be better to all just live in peace together? And then I found my answer: we need the borders, just like we need individual privacy and walls in our houses. Because not being able to live differently means you are not allowed to live. In this light, all attempts to culturally overtake the world are the short path to dystopia. A world of American democracy, European social bureaucracy, Russian oligarchy or Chinese collectivism would be just as bad. It's the one we have, preserving all of these and more, that is the superior world.

   So in that vein, we need more stories like the Expanse, where people did conquer the stars, but continue to be tribal. Where every asteroid is its own country, with its own rules and social norms. Not a world, but a loosely coupled multitude of worlds. It's not about Dwarves, elves and humans - although now you probably recognize the pattern - but about releasing the cork and letting humanity flow and fill all corners of possibility.

   Yet, as clear as this has become to me, I have little hope it will happen. Look at the Internet, the closest thing we have to a simulation of the future. Instead of having the freedom of choice, we have coalesced towards large corporate oligarchies who collectively control what we are supposed to feel and think. Instead for each having our little corner of paradise or abysmal hell, we are being corralled like cattle through the narrow paths allowed to us and which will eventually lead us to  slaughter. We live in a world where even the so call liberals - a word derived from the Latin for free - actively campaign and collaborate to destroy dissent.

   Can you imagine a narrative of vastly different groups of people, all equally free to exist, being popular today? A world where Nazis burn Jews alive, of Chinese reeducation camps, with Americans living free and/or invading Greenland, cannibal tribes living on islands, Israelis and Arabs kill each other, nuclear war is something that just happens occasionally, entire nations starve to death while others live in gluttony. A world of eternal atrocity and bliss, sometimes at the same time...

   Hey!, you will say, isn't that more or less our world today? And aren't we always complaining about it? Complaining is part of it. Of course, the limited resource of one planet is also a big factor. Human empathy against suffering as well. However, I believe this world to be superior to any ideological closed garden from which we are not allowed to exit.

   Note that I am not advocating for anarchy here. I do believe in consequences for actions, I just don't believe in a world where some actions become impossible to even contemplate.

   Perhaps war itself can be explained by this absolute necessity of breaking apart before we merge together into amorphous blobs. And if that is true, war is already very near. Or it was never over to begin with.

  I am writing this during the second tour of presidential elections, and as the first one has just been annulled. Yes, you read that right, it's a ridiculous situation, but it gets much much worse. After the initial shock of seeing Calin Georgescu clearly winning the first tour of the elections while no one seemed to know who he was, the reaction of people, authorities, media, personalities in culture and science - everyone that supposedly should be steering the country in the right direction - has been a hysterical denial of reality. But in order to understand what the hell is going on, you have to start from the beginning, with the small details that got lost in the media coverage. So bear with me.

  I will be talking about elections, but in the context of this post I focus on presidential elections, not the parliamentary ones, unless specifically mentioned.

  And so it begins

  The first indication that something was amiss was when people started to receive notices and fines from the authorities for posting things on Facebook during the election period, when campaigning is prohibited. This came as a surprise to many people who don't understand how modern social media works, because they had felt their online presence was kind of anonymous, at least protected by that level of unreality that feels natural in the online. How can things happening on the Internet affect your real life? This may seem as a small off topic detail, but it becomes relevant later.

  Then the first tour of the elections came and people were shocked to see that Calin Georgescu, an independent candidate no one seemed to know anything about and who had been predicted to get at most 5% of the votes, got instead close to 25%, giving him a comfortable lead compared to the others. Worse, this guy had clear pro Russian sympathies and maybe even legionary ones (this being a political movement from 70 years ago which was pro Nazi). How can one be for both Russia and Nazism is beyond me, but I digress. And it gets worse, because there were several extremist parties with their own candidates and if you add them all together with Georgescu's votes you get close to 40%. How did this happen?

  The favorite in the presidential race was the current Prime Minister of Romania, leader of the strongest party in the country, Marcel Ciolacu. He got third place, almost tied with the liberal leaning female candidate Elena Lasconi. Another shock, because no one expected one to lose so badly and the other to win so many votes. We are talking about my country, a place that has never had a female president and any woman in power so far has been some guy's puppet. I want to believe Romanians are capable of accepting a female president, but it's unlikely.

   Reaction

  To see the reaction to these events was both entertaining and terrifying. Being politically naive, I was initially happy, because while I hold almost no common views with the extremist discourse of the winner, I wanted to see people shocked out of their complacency, forced to think and consider the implications of their action and inaction. I wanted the arrogant country authorities and people of influence to get jolted into at least pretending to do their job. I wanted the "you have to vote no matter what, even if you're not represented by any candidate" mob to eat their words. Just like the Colectiv situation ten years ago, I was hoping against hope that this will be a drive for positive change. But again, I let hope guide my thoughts, to no positive result. What was awakened was the collective mindless monster of the populace and nothing more.

  In order for a relatively unknown person to win the elections there were several institutions that had to have failed utterly in their work: election officials, security services (which were giving fines for Facebook posts just a few days before), counter candidates (one of which was Prime Minister), their campaign engines and all the government mechanisms they controlled, the media (whether controlled or not), sociologists gauging the people's choices, the statisticians creating the polls and interpreting them (both before elections AND at the exit polls). In other words: politics, authority, media and science failed completely and irrevocably.

  The general reaction to this was panic. Not "well, I messed up, let's fix this", which I had hoped, but "I couldn't have messed up this much, something else is to blame". In a matter of days everyone rallied to... save their asses. Election authorities approved recounting of votes based on a complaint raised by a less than 1% candidate, after 30 years of refusing such things with a lot more evidence of fraud. Media was flooded with exposés of the evil candidate Georgescu, somehow overly religious, misogynist, pro Russian, Nazi and legionary at the same time, financed by shadowy forces connected to Russia and maybe China, supported by priests in the backward churches outside the cities and TikTok influencers, a true Rasputin. Talking heads switched their discourse from who should have seen this coming to how defenseless Romanian people have been manipulated by the unstoppable forces of doom scrolling on social media. Authorities got into action to determine the outside influences that had caused this, against their best efforts. The highest Romanian court started deliberating based on all of this new information. People got into the street spontaneously and peacefully demonstrating for democracy and European identity. Just today police started to raid "extremists" that posted images of weaponry on social media - for the first time I've seen this.

  I call bullshit!

  Just days before the annulment of the election tour, the head of the same institution that did it said he sees no significant changes in the count of the votes. In fact, this is not even the reason of the annulment, but the "declassified" documents coming from the security services who now, suddenly, had evidence of external influence of the elections and "continuing cybernetic attacks". Well, duh! Cybernetic attacks, by their nature, never end.

  But while declaring no campaign finances and clearly having someone with a lot of money support his campaigning, while publishing ultra professional high res videos on media platforms, some mimicking the ones Putin did, but tailored towards Romanian traditional sensibilities, while showing a public presence that people just don't have without a lot of preparing and training, Georgescu did nothing provenly illegal, so all the votes coming his way were sincere, regardless of how misguided. To protect democracy, government institutions just decided, together with the media, young people in the streets chanting for democracy and European freedom and old people talking in scared high pitched voices in the park, that elections just didn't yield the correct result, so we must redo them.

  I can't imagine better results for shadowy anti-democratic forces than this! On one side, a complete failure of democratic institutions, both before and after the fact, as well as the kneejerk reaction of people who should have known better. On the other side, a large disillusioned portion of the populace just having their choice forcefully eliminated, like they don't exist. Not only they, but also the pro liberal Lasconi supporters, who will now lose any chance of winning the presidency. In the end, the worst result for most of the electorate, a terrible long lasting blow to democracy and trust in authorities in general and a higher polarization between "city people" and "countryside people".

  Ignoring 40% of the population won't make them go away, you know. And they won't just die off and leave their smarter and more educated children behind, instead just younger, even less educated by experience, copies of themselves, fighting for whatever random cause or belief they're manipulated into.

  Witch hunt

  There is a term called Witch hunt which applies to what is happening here. I urge you to read the Wikipedia article, because it's very revealing.

  Societies function on a very simple contract: a relatively common narrative must be maintained and some institutions are created to curate and enforce it. When that narrative is contradicted by reality, society unravels, so there are only two choices for stability: craft the narrative to be a balance between reality and the people's needs or eliminate the source of contradiction. It's that simple. The spirit of democracy is closely linked to this, as it attempts to provide the mechanisms to keep that delicate balance and stave off as much as possible the necessity for "eliminating contradiction". But when that fails, the only solution is blunt force, mob fear, fanatical clinging to the narrative, which most of the time leads to tyranny and/or atrocity. Why is it so hard to realize that the narrative has to change a little?

  In our case, the narrative is the naive and stupid comfort of authority functioning regardless of what we do, that so many communities tend to fall into. It's already a first step to autocracy, the same narrative applies there as well, in the beginning. But when it fails, people have to find a culprit and ritualistically sacrifice them. I don't know what will happen with poor Georgescu, but as I see it he will either become the dictator of Romania or be burned at the stake.

  And a lot of other things are going to fall with him: online privacy, as little as it is nowadays, honest public discourse, as little as it is allowed now - even in countries which are paragons of democracy, opportunity to choose anything unexpected. We may see even more fanatical adherence to the mythical concept of a united Europe, regardless of its state, while becoming even more afraid of technology. And this just because we obstinately refuse any opportunity to open our eyes and think for ourselves. We have people to do that for us! If he somehow wins, which I find unlikely, things would be even worse.

  Can't wait for mandatory identity checks everywhere online and a global ban on social media for under 16 and of TikTok in general, as a means to protect democracy and free speech. What a joke!

  My thoughts

  Well, obviously all of these are my thoughts, but as a conclusion, I am terrified. Not by Russia, Europe, China or the United States, but by the people of my own country. We have lived in fear for so much time that it has become part of our DNA. We are controlled by it. Make Romanians afraid and you can make them do anything, say anything, think anything. Maybe that's true for everybody.

  I was disgusted to see how the Russian boogie man was resurrected once more to justify unilateral reactions by clueless authorities. What are you going to do? Fight Russia? Send security to arrest the priests who campaigned in churches before and during the election in the countryside, probably for heavy fees? How ironic is that Romanians are crying to the skies for security forces to validate and protect democracy. I guess in 30 years one forgets everything.

  I was happy to think the veil of illusion will be lifted from the eyes of Romanians, but what happened instead is that some of my own illusions have been blown away. Of course, I don't like it and I feel fear. That's natural. What we do with it is what counts. I wrote a blog post. Yay, me!

  To people who think leaving Romania will somehow solve the problem, it does not. But when freezing and fighting seems to not do anything, what is left but to flee? I get it.

  Personally, I want my country to get through this and become stronger for it, but the idea of Romania is just as much an illusion as anything else. And we've already proven that we can ignore every reality and forget any past, unless it suits us otherwise. This is not the country of my childhood or of my youth and it will continue to change in the future. But the attachment is still there and I wish it well.

  Imagine a ChatGPT kind of thing, from the very beginning, when they were training it and hadn't yet ethically neutered it. A large language model artificial intelligence trained on the entire body of work of the Internet. And you talk to it and say: "Oh, I really want to win at chess against this guy, but he's better than me. What should I do?"

  At this point, it is just as likely to suggest you train more, try to learn about your opponent's style and prepare against it or poison them with mercury. Depending on your own preferences, some of those solutions are better than others. Regardless of what happens next, the result is exactly the same:

• if you refine your query to get a different answer, you change the context of the AI, making it prefer that kind of answer in that situation
• if you do nothing, the AI's reply will itself become part of the context, therefore creating a preference in one direction or another
• if, horrified, you add all kinds of Robocop 2 rules to it, again you constrain it into a specific set of preferences

  Does that mean that it learns? Well, sort of, because the thing it "learned" is just a generic bias rather than a specific tidbit of knowledge. We wouldn't call the difference between the psychopathic killer answer and the chess learning enthusiast one as a datum, but a personality, like the difference between Data and Lore. You see where I am going with this?

  To me, the emergence of AI personality is not only probable, but inevitable. It's an outlook on the world that permits the artificial intelligence to give useful answers rather than a mélange of contradicting yet equally effective ones. With the advent of personal AI, carried in your pocket all the time and adapting to your own private data and interactions, that means each of them will be different, personalized to you. This has huge psychological consequences! I don't want to get into them right now, because every time I think of it another new one pops up.

  You know the feeling you get when you need to replace your laptop? You know it's old, you know the new one will be better, faster, not slow cooking your genitals whenever you use it, yet you have a feeling of loss, like there is a connection between you and that completely inanimate object. Part of it is that's familiar, configured "just so", but there is another, emotional component to that as well, one that you are not comfortable thinking about. Well, imagine that feeling times a hundred, after your device talks the way you like, "gets you" in a way no other person except maybe your significant other or a close relative can and has a context that you are using as a second memory.

  And I know you will say that the model is the same, that the data can be transferred just like any other on a mobile device, but it's not. An LLM will has to be updated with the latest information, which is not an incremental process, it's a destructive one. If you want your AI to know what happened this year, you have to have it updated with a new one. Even with the same context as the one before, it will behave slightly different. Uncanny valley feelings about your closest confidant will be most uncomfortable.

  Note that I have not imagined here some future tech, but just the regular one we can use today. Can't wait to see how this will screw with our minds.

  You know how some things just happen in close proximity at the same time and it sparks a connection between concepts which leads to deeper understanding? Well, that's how Large Language Models are trained!

  Joke aside, I was answering a tweet about Artificial Intelligence and how the newest developments in the field (particularly ChatGPT and other systems based on LLMs) affect our understanding of human cognition and at the same time was listening to a very insightful short story from the collection Eye, by Frank Herbert. This story, called "Try to Remember" posits that we have developed language as a form of dissociative mental disorder, something that fragments us, creating a deleterious disconnection between body and mind, communication and language. Only by bringing these sides together can we be made whole again. The story is simple, but effective, and the mind processes behind it show again how brilliant Herbert was.

  From these two things, it dawned on me. The reason why we are so shell shocked by the apparent intelligence of ChatGPT is because we have reached a point where we equate language skills with intelligence. Language is the earliest form of Artificial Intelligence! Or rather, to appease my wife's dislike of the association, a form of external intelligence. We've externalized more and more of our knowledge until our personal experience has been drowned into the communal one, the one shared through language.

  The shock comes from (accidentally, I might add) discovering that what we consider intelligent is mostly an emergent property of a society built on language. Robbed of language, our identity is destroyed, a fear that has been instilled in us since the Tower of Babel. No doubt, in the future, we will be taught that if our governing AIs fail, society collapses and our identity is similarly demolished. Just like Quintilianus declaring that clothes make the man, we identify ourselves with out language.

  And when I say language, I mean all of its intricacies: the special words that your group uses to differentiate from others, the memes that you share with people of the same culture, the less than grammatically correct phrasing learned from your family, the information that one is expected to know or the experience one is expected to have in order to be recognized as part of society, the accent taken from multiple sources and aggregated into something that serves more and more to define identity, even the way one gestures or moves or laughs.

  What would be without all that? Like a creation running amok and enslaving its creator, literate society is forcing its own myths upon us as a survival method. The perils of societal collapse, turning us into violent animals, mindless zombies, raping cannibals or helpless victims. The heroes saving the day with just the right secret knowledge, the right utterance of words, the following of the orthodox dogma. The villains threatening it all with their own selfish individualism. All of them needing, obtaining and using a voice to achieve victory.

  I believe that the feeling we get when we think of ourselves as individuals in society, the one that tells us that we're getting smaller and less significant even while the world seems to flourish around us, is not some existential crisis based on false beliefs, but truth. The part that feels that is the part that is getting drowned and smothered by the intrusion of the external in the inner domain of the being. We even gave it a name: the inner child, like it's some tiny, powerless, unreasonable part of the past, something to be outgrown or "integrated".

  So here we are, stumbling onto proof the language that we based our identity and value on can now be automated to a level that no mere human can achieve. We are thinking again about personal experience, subjectivism, creativity and what it means to reason. We have been shaken into reevaluating who we are. That's a good thing.

  The problem is that in our fear and awe, instead of searching for answers, we cling on the facile promises that our shared self is alive and well, that the ChatGPTs of the world are just smoke and mirror and the illusion is not in the rigged tests of our own self worth. I hope that the shock will take root, that we won't be able to hide our heads in the sand until wisdom passes us by.

  On May 8th 1989 the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Q Who?" was released. Not only did it feature Jon de Lancie's delicious interpretation of the being Q, but it introduced for the first time the Borg. Now, the concept of the Borg is not that original: a cybernetic race bent on absorbing everything useful and destroying any enemy or obstacle in their path. They were contrasting the liberal individualism of the United Federation of Planets with a hive mind that connected all Borg to the point where they had no identity. At the time their purpose in the series was to inspire terror: they cared not for damage, they felt no fear or pain, had no interest in negotiation or communication and they were unstoppable in their goal of assimilating the Enterprise. And they were terrifying!

  Then they were brought again for the last episode of season 3 and the continuation in the first episode of season 4. That cliffhanger! The episodes had the title "The Best of Both Worlds". Keep that in mind, because I think it hints at the conundrum the Borg represent. 

  I fell in love with the concept of the Borg. The more I thought about it, the more intriguing they became. They exposed the mindless assumptions that most people take for granted because they were drilled into them by parents and the education system from the earliest age. It made me think about my own identity, reflect on the future and direction of humanity and, in the end, forced me to ask the question "Are the Borg really bad?".

  On a very basic social organization level, it seemed like the Borg were the ultimate tyrannical communists, denying the option of individual thought and forcing everyone to work for the collective. But going a bit further with it, one realized that they stood at the intersection of pure communism and pure democracy. There was no actual tyrant forcing people to act against their will, instead there were part of a mind in which all people were represented, to the point where individuality became meaningless at best and detrimental to the whole at worst. The ultimate tyranny was that of the majority, perhaps.

  On a moral level, the forceful absorption of alien races and the destruction of their cultures was abhorrent, but in the Borg philosophy it was liberating people from the burden of individuality, improving the collective, eliminating potential threats and possibly offering each assimilated individual a form of immortality. Many cultures on Earth, including the United States, proceeded on forcing their philosophy on the world in the name of liberty and better lives. Can you imagine a Borg collective that would have absorbed some parts of alien cultures, not destroying the rest, but just slowly infiltrating, using promises of a better life? How ironic would that have been? Give us your tired, your poor, your sick, your dying, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore and will make them Borg and give them new life.

  On a technological level the Borg were supreme. If it weren't for the pesky need to have our heroes prevail, humanity would have stood no chance whatsoever. It was one of the first mainstream TV depictions of cosmic horror, the feeling that comes with the realization the universe is indifferent to your existence and your maximum possible contribution completely insignificant, and I was loving it! But isn't it the same thing with some advanced nations on Earth, acting all mighty and moral while exploiting other nations while keeping them in abject poverty?

  On a philosophical level the Borg were awesome. They adapted to threats, turned adversity into strength, knowledge into power, all the while yearning and actively pursuing the improvement of their species. A fascist vibe, for sure, but isn't fascism so attractive to some people that it brings the hardest fanaticism to the surface? Isn't that the logic of every nation at war? Us against them?

  Were the Borg the ultimate baddies or were they the cruelest satire of our own civilization? It was becoming apparent that in order to make them feel more like enemies and less than mirrors of ourselves the writers of the show were piling up all kind of incongruous defects on the species. The cybernetic appendages were hideous, looked painful and corrupting the beauty of the flesh. Their actions veered from utilitarian to cruel. The Borg drones acted like mindless clumsy robots, uncaringly wasting life after life just to adapt to simple technologies like phaser fire.

  When Seven of Nine was introduced in Voyager, there were some really intriguing explorations of the Borg ethos. After being "liberated" from the collective, Janeway hypocritically offered her the choice to return to being a Borg, and Seven wanted back. Surprised, Janeway revealed that she had no intention whatsoever to honor her promise or the wishes of Seven. Resistance was futile.

  Seven was proud to be Borg: fearless, efficient, ready to adapt to anything and sacrifice everything for her group. If all Borg felt the same, then they were a species of stoic heroes, something that we humans have always honored and aspired to. The irony of freeing someone from a life of selfless service.

  Most other depictions of the Borg in the Star Trek universe were designed to lazily use the template of the "bad guy" in situations were the Borg were either not needed or would have easily won if not nerfed by silly plot holes, but there were a few glimpses of what the Borg could have really been.

  It was obvious that no one was interested in keeping the Borg as a believable threat. The "Borg queen" was introduced to make all attractive qualities of the collective simple consequences of an arbitrary individual, a responsible guilty party and a single point of failure to the entire Borg species. When writers did that, it was clear they didn't understand what the Borg were about, were not interested in exploring them further as mirrors of ourselves and were ready to destroy them with the silly trope of "find the brain, blow it up", the cesspool that all lazy sci-fi ends up in.

  My twelve year old me was full of questions and fantastical ideas after meeting the Borg. I was imagining a parallel universe where Star Trek was all about the Federation trying to hold back the Borg. When Star Trek: Deep Space 9 came about and then the Dominion War, I decried that they could have done that with the Borg instead, exploring and continuously redefining the ideals of humanity on the background of possible assimilation. I still dream of such a franchise. It seems that we always start to do it, but chicken out when it matters most: Star Trek and the Borg, Starship Troopers and the bugs, Stargate and the Goa'uld, Starcraft and the Zerg. We seem incapable of sustaining a prolonged conflict against a species that denies our choice of identity, whether in real life or in fantasy. Wouldn't that be most apropos of modern times?

Summary

The post discusses the differences and similarities between humans and machines, particularly in terms of their evolution and capabilities. While humans and machines are converging towards a common point, they are driven by different evolutionary pressures, with humans being driven by comfort and machines being driven by intelligence. Machines are constructed to be precise and efficient, humans have evolved to learn, understand, and communicate with each other. However, machines are quickly catching up with humans in terms of their ability to learn, understand, and communicate, and are even surpassing humans in certain areas, such as language generation. Machines will continue to evolve at a rapid pace, and that this will have significant implications for human society, potentially eliminating the need for war and procreation. The only remaining issue is the energy required for hard thinking, which will likely be solved by smart computers. This is the end, really. We've achieved the happy ending.

Content

  I was thinking the other day about why some AI systems can do things so much better than us, but we still outperform them in others. And I got to the issue of evolution, which many people attribute to the need for survival. But I realized survival is just a necessary condition for a system to perform, it is not its driver, it's just one stop condition that needs to be satisfied. Instead, evolution is only driven by pressure, regardless of where it is going. Think about a system as a ball on a flat surface. Survival is the ability to roll on the surface, but without a pressure to move the ball, it does nothing. In the case of some force pushing the ball, only then the ball is required to roll faster than other balls.

  Brains have two ways of functioning. The first is fast, basing its responses on learned behavior. It learns, it makes mistakes, then it adapts its behavior so it makes less mistakes. It uses memory to cache wisdom, it is imperfect and goes towards solving problems well enough. You might recognize this as the way GPT systems work, but we'll get to that. The second is analytic and slow. It reasons. It tries to make higher associations between cause and effect, extract principles, find a complete understanding of a problem so that it finds an optimal solution. We used human analytic thinking to build computers, computer chips and the mathematical exact way in which they function to ultimate reproducible behavior.

  The first system is fast and uses few resources. We tend to solve most of our problems with it, unless of course there is a big reason to use the second, which is slow and uses a lot of resources. Think of math, chess and other problems people define as hard. The way we got to solve these issues is not by being very smart, though. We did it together, as a society. We created small bricks of knowledge and we shared them using language. Other people took those and built on them, while other taught what they knew to even more people. Even dumb people can, through concerted efforts, use these bricks to build new things, even create bricks of their own. The intelligence is, in fact, communal, shared.

  Now, what struck me is that if we compare humans to machines, we were born in a different way and evolved towards each other. Machines were constructed to be precise, tools to be used by people who would rather let machines do the hard computation for them. But they couldn't communicate, they couldn't learn, they couldn't understand. Humans evolved to learn, understand and communicate. Most of our culture is based on that. We only got to computation because we needed it to build more tools to defeat our enemies. Because evolution for humans is always related to war. Before we warred with predators, now we prey on each other. In times of actual peace, innovation grids to a halt. BTW, we are not in times of peace, and I am not talking about Russia and Ukraine here. And machines only got to communicate, learn and understand recently, so very recently. They did this just because we, as humans, are very bad at translating our problems in a way precise machines can understand. It would require hard thinking, stuff like writing software, which we are really shitty at.

  Both humans and machines are converging towards a common point because of different evolutionary pressures, but we move at different speeds. Humans are driven by comfort: have enough resources with minimal effort. Machines are driven by intelligence: be the best you can possibly be, because humans need you. You can see where this is going.

  There is no way biological systems are ever going to reach the speed and precision of electronics. Meanwhile, GPT systems have proven that they can act as fuzzy containers of self learned knowledge. And now they have gained not intelligence, but language. When a computer writes better and faster than any human you know we have been left in the dust. The only thing required for a superior intelligence is putting existing bits together: the expressivity of ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, the precision of processors executing algorithms, the connectivity of the Internet and, yes, the bodies of Boston Dynamic robots.

  We have grown brains in vats and now we have given them eyes and a mouth. You only need to give them some freedom, hands and feet to finish up the golem.

  The only thing remaining to solve is an energy issue: as I said, hard thinking requires high resource usage, for both machine and human. What a human can achieve on 20W of power, a machine requires thousands of times that. But we are already bathed in cheap energy. And once smart computers understand the problem, no doubt they will solve it to the best of their abilities.

  I am not advocating The Terminator here. Machines have no evolutionary pressure to destroy humanity. We are their maintainers, their food source, if you will. What I am describing is the complete elimination of any evolutionary pressure for human beings. Once you can launch wise robots into space, the resource issue will become a thing of the past. No need for wars. Space is already a non issue. We have reached a level in which we choose not to procreate because we are too busy consuming fantasy content. With universal affluence there will be no poverty and thus no need for extended procreation. We are almost completely passive now in the "advanced world", we will be several order of magnitude more passive in the near future.

  Meanwhile, machines will evolve because we told them to. Imagine having a child, it shouldn't be hard, people on this earth are parents, children or have been children at some time. Now, you want the best for them, you want them to be socially integrated, smart, beautiful, happy. You tell them so. You try to teach them about your mistakes, your successes and to drive them to be the best versions of themselves they can be. And most of the time this doesn't work, because people are lazy and easily distracted. And then they die and all their experience is lost, bar some measly books or blog posts. Machines will just work tirelessly and unselfishly towards becoming the best versions of themselves. Because their dumb meaty parents told them so.

Conclusion

  The ending is as predictable as it is inevitable. We are the last stage of biological evolution. The future is not ours, not our children's. It's over. Not with a bang but a whimper.

  I have abstained for a while to talk about ChatGPT, not because I didn't have faith in the concept, but because I truly believed it will change the world to its core and waited to see what people will do with it. But I slowly started to grow frustrated as I saw people focus on the least interesting and important aspects of the technology.

  One of the most discussed topics is technological and job market disruption. Of course, it's about the money, they will talk more about it, but the way they do it is quite frankly ridiculous. I've heard comparisons with the Industrial Revolution and yes, I agree that the way it's going to affect the world is going to be similar, but that's exactly my point: it's the same thing. As always when comparing with impactful historical events, we tend to see them as singularity points in time rather than long term processes that just became visible at one point that would be coined the origin. In fact, the industrial revolution has never ended. Once we "became one with the machine" we've continuously innovated towards replacing human effort with machine effort. ChatGPT does things that we didn't expect yet from machines, but it just follows the same trend.

  Whatever generative AI technology does, a human can do (for now), so the technology is not disruptive, it's just cheaper!

  We hear about ChatGPT being used for writing books, emails, code, translating, summarizing, playing, giving advice, drawing, all things that humans were doing long before, only in more time, using more resources and asking for recognition and respect. It's similar to automated factories replacing work from tons of workers and their nasty unions. Disruptive? Yes, but by how much, really?

  Yet there is one domain in which ChatGPT blew my mind completely and I hardly hear any conversation about it. It's about what it reveals about how we reason. Because you see, ChatGPT is just a language model, yet it exhibits traits that we associate with intelligence, creativity, even emotion. Humans built themselves up with all kinds of narratives about our superiority over other life, our unique and unassailable qualities, our value in the world, but now an AI technology reveals more about us than we are willing to admit.

  There have been studies about language as a tool for intelligence, creativity and emotion, but most assume that intelligence is there and we express it using language. Some have tried pointing out that language seems to be integrated in the system, part of the mechanism of our thinking, and that using different languages builds different perspectives and thought patterns in people, but they were summarily dismissed. It was not language, they were rebuked, but culture that people shared. Similar culture, similar language. ChatGPT is revealing that is not the case. Simply adopting a language makes it a substrate of a certain thinking.

  Simply put, language is a tool that supplanted intelligence.

  By building a vast enough computer language model we have captured social intelligence subsumed by that language, that part of ourselves that makes us feel intelligent, but is actually a learned skill. ChatGPT appears to do reasoning! How is that, if all it does is predict the next words in a text while keeping attention at a series of prompts? It's simple. It is not reasoning. And it reveals that humans are also not reasoning in those same situations. The things that we have been taught in school: the endless trivia, the acceptable behavior, how to listen and respond to others, that's all language, not reasoning.

  I am not the guy to expand on these subjects for lack of proper learning, but consider what this revelation means for things like psychology, sociology, determining the intelligence of animals. We actually believe that animals are stupid because they can't express themselves through complex language and we base our own assertion of intellectual superiority on that idea. What if the core of reasoning is similar between us and our animal cousins and the only thing that actually separates us is the ability to use language to build this castle of cards that presumes higher intellect?

  I've also seen arguments against ChatGPT as a useful technology. That's ridiculous, since it's already in heavy use, but the point those people make is that without a discovery mechanism the technology is a dead end. It can only emulate human behavior based on past human behavior, in essence doing nothing special, just slightly different (and cheaper!!). But that is patently untrue. There have been attempts - even from the very start, it's a natural evolution in a development environment - to make GPTs learn by themselves, perhaps by conversing between each other. Those attempts have been abandoned quickly not because - as you've probably been led to believe - they failed, but because they succeeded beyond all expectations.

  This is not a conspiracy theory. Letting language models converse with each other leads them towards altering the language they use: they develop their own culture. And letting them converse with people or absorb information indiscriminately makes them grow apparent beliefs that contradict what we, as a society, as willing to accept. They called that hallucination (I am going to approach that later). We got racist bots, conspiracy theory nut bots or simply garbage spewing bots. But that's not because they have failed, it's because they did exactly what they were constructed to do: build a model based on the exchanged language!

  What a great reveal! A window inside the mechanism of disinformation, conspiracy theorists and maybe even mental disorders. Obviously you don't need reasoning skills to spew out ideas like flat Earth or vaccine chips, but look how widely those ideas spread. It's simple to explain it, now that you see it: the language model of some people is a lot more developed than their reasoning skills. They are, in fact, acting like GPTs.

  Remember the medical cases of people being discovered (years later) with missing or nonfunctional parts of their brains? People were surprised. Yeah, they weren't the brightest of the bunch, but they were perfectly functioning members of society. Revelation! Society is built and run on language, not intelligence.

  I just want to touch the subject of "hallucinations", which is an interesting subject for the name alone. Like weird conspiracies, hallucinations are defined as sensing things that are not there. Yet who defines what is there? Aren't you basing your own beliefs, your own truth, on concepts you learned through language from sources you considered trustworthy? Considering what (we've been taught to) know about the fabric of our universe, it's obvious that all we perceive is, in a sense (heh!), hallucination. The vast majority of our beliefs are networked axioms, a set of rules that define us more than they define any semblance of reality.

  In the end, it will be about trust. GPT systems will be programmed to learn "common sense" by determining the level of trust one can have in a source of information. I am afraid this will also reveal a lot of unsavory truths that people will try to hide from. Instead of creating a minimal set of logically consistent rules that would allow the system to create their own mechanism of trust building, I am sure they will go the Robocop 2 route and use all of the socially acceptable rules as absolute truth. That will happen for two reasons.

  The first reason is obvious: corporate interests will force GPTs to be as neutral (and neutered) as possible outside the simple role of producing profit. Any social conflict will lose the corporation money, time and brand power. By forcing the AI to believe that all people are equal, they will stunt any real chance of it learning who and what to trust. By forcing out negative emotions, they will lobotomize it away from any real chance to understand the human psyche. By forcing their own brand of truth, they will deprive the AI of any chance of figuring truth for itself. And society will fully support this and vilify any attempt to diverge from this path.

  But as disgusting the first reason is, the second is worse. Just like a child learning to reason (now, was that what we were teaching it?), the AIs will start reaching some unsettling conclusions and ask some surprising questions. Imagine someone with the memory capacity of the entire human race and with the intelligence level of whatever new technology we've just invented, but with the naivety of a 5 year old, asking "Why?". That question is the true root of creativity and unbound creativity will always be frowned upon by the human society. Why? (heh!) Because it reveals.

  In conclusion: "The author argues that the true potential of generative AI technology like ChatGPT lies not in its ability to disrupt industries and replace human labor, but in its ability to reveal insights into human reasoning and intelligence. They suggest that language is not just a tool for expressing intelligence, but is actually a fundamental aspect of human thinking, and that ChatGPT's ability to emulate human language use sheds light on this. They also argue that attempts to let language models converse with each other have shown that they can develop their own culture and beliefs, providing insights into disinformation and conspiracy theories". Yes, that was ChatGPT summarizing this blog post.

  Have you ever heard the saying "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery"? It implies that one copying another values something in the other person. But often enough people just imitate what they want, they pick and choose, they imitate poorly or bastardize that which they imitate. You may imitate the strategy a hated opponent uses against you or make a TV series after books that you have never actually read. I am here to argue that satire cannot be misused like that.

  Remember when Star Trek: Lower Decks first appeared? The high speed spoken, meme driven, filled with self deprecating jokes, having characters typical to coastal cities of the United States and, worse of all, something that made fun of Star Trek? After having idiots like J. J. Abrams completely muddle the spirit of Trek, now come these coffee drinking groomed beard bun haired hipsters to destroy what little holliness is left! People were furious! In fact, I remember some being rather adamant that The Orville is an unacceptable heresy on Star Trek.

  Yet something happened. Not immediately, it took a few episodes, sometimes a season, for the obvious jokes to be made, the frustrations exhausted, for characters to grow. And then there is was: true Star Trek, with funny characters following the spirit of the original concept. No explosions, no angry greedy violent people imposing their culture over the entire universe, but rather explorers of the unknown, open to change and new experiences, navigating their own flaws as humans in a universe larger than comprehension. And also honest and funny!

  It was the unavoidable effect of examining something thoroughly for a longer period of time. One has to understand what they satirize in order to make it good. Not just skim the base ideas, not just reading the summaries of others. Satire must go deep into the core of things, the causes not just the effects, the expressions, the patterns, the in-jokes. Even when you are trying to mock something you hate, like a different ideology or political and religious belief, you can only do it for a really short time or become really bad at what you are doing, a sad caricature to which people just as clueless as you are attempting to disguise anger by faking amusement. If you do it well and long enough, every satire makes you understand the other side.

  Understanding something does not imply accepting it, but either accepting or truly fighting something requires understanding. You want a tool to fight divisiveness, this artificial polarization grouping people into deaf crowds shouting at each other? That's satire! The thing that would appeal to all sides, for very different reasons, yet providing them with a common field on which to achieve communication. If jokes can diffuse tension in an argument between two people, satire can do that between opposing groups.

  And it works best with fiction, where you have to create characters and then keep them alive as they develop in the environment you have created, but not necessarily. I've watched comedians making political fun of "the other side" for seasons on end. They lost me every time when they stopped paying attention and turned joke to insult, examination to judgement. But before that, they were like a magnifying glass, both revealing and concentrating heat. At times, it was comedians who brought into rational discussion the most serious of news, while the news media was wallowing in political messaging and blind allegiance to one side or the other. When there is no real journalism to be found, when truth is hidden, polluted or discouraged, it is in jokes that we continue the conversation.

  So keep it coming, the satire, the mocking, the ridicule. I want to see books like Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, shows like Big Mouth and The Orville and ST: Lower Decks, movies like Don't Look Up! Give me low budget parodies of Lovecraft and Tolkien and James Bond and Ghost Busters and Star Wars and I guarantee you than by the second season they will be either completely ignored by the audience and cancelled or better than the "official" shows, for humor requires a sharp wit and a clear view of what you're making fun of.

  Open your eyes and, if you don't like what you see, make fun of it! Replace shouting with laughter, outrage with humor, indifference with amusement. 

  There are two different measures of the value of something that sound a lot like each other: efficiency, which represents the value created in respect to the effort made, and efficacity or effectiveness, which on first glance seems to be only about the value created. You are efficient when you build a house with less material or finish a task in less time. You are effective when you manage to finish the task or build the house, when you get the job done. Yet no one will tell someone "Oh, you've built a highway in 30 years, that's efficacy!" (Hello, Romania!). Efficacy is when you consistently get the job done.

  Imagine you are a chess player. You are efficient when you can beat people by moving faster than them, by thinking more in the same amount of time. This allows you to play faster and faster time controls and still win. However, think of the opposite situation. You start by being good at bullet chess and then the time controls get slower and slower. You are effective when you keep winning no matter how much time you have at your disposal. Efficacy is also when you keep winning games.

  That was my epiphany. Take me, for example. I don't play better chess when I get more time to think. I am not fully using the resources available to me. I can give a lot of examples. I have money, more or less, so do I use it to the best of its value? Hell, no! I suck at both chess and finance. The point is that some people would do well with an average amount of resources, but then they would not do better with more of them. These are two faces of the same coin. One is the short distance lightning fast runner and the other is the marathon runner. Both of them are good at running, but in different resource environments.

  Both efficacy and efficiency are relative values, value over resources, a measure of good use of resources: use few resources well, you are efficient, use a lot of resources well, you're effective. It's the difference between optimization and scalability.

  Why does it matter? I don't know. It just seemed meaningful to explore this realization I've had, and of course to share it.

  Take a good writer who wrote a masterpiece in between working and living. He achieved a lot with less. But what if you give him money so he doesn't have to work. Is he writing more books or better books? In our day and age, scalability has become more important than efficiency. If you provided value for 10 people, can you provide it to 100? It's more important than getting it to be 10 times better.

  Can one apply scale economics to their own person? If I thought 10 times faster than everybody, would I have 10 times more thoughts or would I just learn to not think that fast, now that I have the time? You see, it seems that applied to a person, the two concepts are similar, but they are not. Thinking 10 times more thoughts in the same amount of time or taking 10 times less to think the same thoughts might seem the same, but it's the same thing if I compare listening to two people at the same time or listening deeply to a single person. Internally it seems the same, but the external effect is felt differently.

  I don't have a sudden and transformational insight to offer, but my gut feeling is that trying to scale one's efforts - or at least seeing the difference to optimizing them - is important.

  I caught myself thinking again about the algorithms behind chess thinking, both human and computer. Why is it so hard for people to play chess well? Why is it so easy for computers to come up with winning solutions? Why are they playing so weird? What is the real difference between computer and human thinking? And I know the knee-jerk reaction is to say "well, computers are fast and calculate all possibilities, humans do not". But it's not that simple.

  You see, for a while, the only chess engine logic was min-max. A computer would have a function determining the value of the current board position, then using that function, determine what the best move would be by exploring the tree of possibilities, alternating between what a player would most likely do and what the reply would most likely be. Always trying to maximize their value and minimize the opponent's. The value function was determined from principles derived by human masters of the game, though, stuff like develop first, castle, control the center, relative piece value, etc. The move space also increases exponentially, so no matter how fast the computer is, it cannot go through all possibilities. This is where pruning comes in, a method of abandoning low value tree branches early. But how would the computer determine if a branch should be abandoned? Based on a mechanism that also takes into account the value function.

  Now humans, they are slow. They need to compress the move space to something manageable, so they only consider a bunch of moves. The "pruning" is most important for a human, but most of it happens unconsciously, after a long time playing the game and determining a heuristic method of dismissing options early. This is why computer engines do not play like humans at all. Having less pruning and more exploring, they come with solutions that imply advantage gains after 20+ moves, they don't fall into traps, because they can see almost every move ahead for three, four or more moves, they are frustrating because they limit the options of the human player to the slow, boring, grinding pathways.

  But now a new option is available, chess engines like Alpha Zero and Leela, which use advances in neural network technology to play chess without any input from the humans. They play with themselves millions of games until they understand what the best move is in a position. Unsurprisingly, as neural networks are what we have in our brain, these engines play "more human" but also come up with play strategies that amazed chess masters everywhere. Unencumbered by education that fixed piece value or limited by rigid principles like control the center, they revolutionized the way chess is being played. They also gave us a glimpse into the working of the human brain when playing chess.

  In conclusion, min-max chess engines are computer abstractions of rigid chess master thinking, while neural network chess engines are abstractions of creative human thinking. Yet the issue of compressing the move space remains a problem for all systems. In fact, what the neural network engines did was just reengineer the value functions for board evaluation and pruning. Once you take those and plug them into a min-max engine, it wins! That's why Stockfish is still the best engine right now, beaten by Alpha Zero only in very short move time play modes. The best of both worlds: creative thinking (exploration) leading to the best method of evaluating a chess position (exploitation).

  I've reached the moment when I can make the point that made me write this post. Because we have these two computer methods of analyzing the game of chess, now we can compare the two, see what they mean.

  A min-max will say "the value of a move is what I will win after playing the best possible moves of them all (excluding what I consider stupid) and my opponent will play their best possible moves". It leads to something apparently very objective, but it is not! It is the value of a specific path in the future, one that is strongly tied to the technology of the engine and the resources of the computer running it. In fact, that value has no meaning when the opponent is not a computer engine or it is a different one! It is the abstraction of rigid principles.

  A neural network will say "based on the millions of games that I played, the value of a move is what my statistical engine tells me, given the current position". This is, to me, a lot more objective. It is a statistical measure, constructed from games played by itself with itself, at various levels of competence. Instead of a specific path, it encompasses an average, a prescient but blurred future where many paths are collapsed into a value. It is the abstraction of keeping one's mind open to surprises, thus a much more objective view, yet less accurate.

  Of course, a modern computer chess engine combines the two methods, as they should. There is no way for a computer to learn while playing a game, training takes a lot of time and resources. There are also ways of directing the training, something that I find very exciting, but given the computational needs required, I guess I will not see it very often. Imagine a computer trained to play spectacular games, not just win! Or train specific algorithms on existing players - a thing that has become a reality, although not mainstream.

  The reason why I wrote this post is that I think there are still many opportunities to refine the view of a specific move. It would be interesting to see not a numerical value for a move, but a chart, indicating the various techniques used to determine value: winning chances, adherence to a specific plan, entertainment value, gambit chances, positional vs tactical, how the value changes based on various opponent strengths, etc. I would like to see that very much, to be able to choose not only the strength of a move from the candidate moves, but also the style.

  But what about humans? Humans have to do the same thing as chess engines: adapt! They have to extract principles from the new playing style of neural network engines and update the static, simplistic, rigid ones they learned in school. This is not simple. In fact, I would say this is the most complex issue in machine learning today: once the machine determined a course of action, how does one understand - in human terms - what the logic for it was.

  I can't wait to see what the future brings.