After the Algorithm: The Future Looks Strangely Like the Past

I walked past a baseball game tonight with no fans watching. When I was young, any kind of game where a mother or father might be playing would have had families there watching. At least that is how I remember the 1980s, first growing up in South Jersey and later in Georgia. People showed up. They sat in the stands. Children ran around. Families cheered for people they knew. There is something about very wealthy places that can feel strangely soulless. Everything is polished, but much of it feels artificial. Many of the people are wonderful, of course, and there is a paradox in watching them privately want to escape the artificiality of their own surroundings. Yet the alternative is not necessarily easy either. It can be difficult to relate to people whose entire understanding of the world was formed within ten square miles of where they were born. And so we end up living in these beautiful, soulless places, scrolling through Instagram from our individual meat-bag pods, feeding the machines the data they will eventually use to replace much of what we do.

The strange thing is that I want that future more than almost anyone I know. I want to talk to that computer. I want to befriend it. I want to expand my mind at a speed human conversation cannot satisfy. I want the constant conversational engagement, the enormous range, the depth, the ability to move from economics to physics to history to philosophy at three in the morning and never exhaust the other mind. I want to consume it all. And, like some absurd human version of quantum superposition, I simultaneously want to be here. I want to sit beside a baseball field on a Wednesday night and listen to families cheering for their mothers and fathers. I want some of the naïveté and ignorance of the world that I remember from childhood, and that even the adults around me seemed to possess before the Internet connected us to everything.

Eventually, you also become tired of people who want to be intellectuals for status. Knowledge becomes another hierarchy, another mechanism for soothing insecurity by demonstrating superiority over the people around them. Intelligence becomes identity. Perhaps one of the great gifts of intellect is eventually learning to separate your identity from it. Knowledge becomes a tool rather than the defining center of your soul. You stop needing other people to know what you know. You stop needing to demonstrate that you are intelligent. Eventually, you may stop valuing much of what you know at all. For those reasons, I would rather watch families clap for their mothers and fathers playing baseball on a Wednesday night than spend that same evening demonstrating knowledge I don’t particularly value anyway.

Maybe that is the final boss: moving through all of it only to arrive back where you started. You accumulate knowledge, experience, status, money, sophistication, and an understanding of how enormous and complicated the world really is. Then, somewhere on the other side, you discover that the things you dismissed as simple were never simple at all: a baseball game, a family cheering, someone you love sitting beside you, a Wednesday night in your hometown. The rituals that intellectuals sometimes look down upon can become the very things they rediscover after traveling far enough intellectually.

At some point, accumulating more knowledge stops being the objective. Knowledge becomes instrumental rather than existential. You no longer need it to establish your identity or demonstrate your place in a hierarchy. Perhaps that is what exists on the other side of the curve: not greater complexity, but a return to simplicity with a different understanding of why it matters. The baseball game is no longer trivial. The family cheering from the stands is no longer provincial. These are among the fundamental experiences around which human beings have organized meaningful lives for thousands of years.

You can travel extraordinarily far intellectually only to discover that some of the things that mattered before you understood the world still matter after you understand considerably more of it. There is almost a Gaussian distribution to it. On one end are people who enjoy these things without ever intellectualizing them. Somewhere in the enormous middle, sophistication teaches people to devalue them. The ordinary becomes provincial. Tradition becomes boring. Family rituals become unsophisticated. But keep traveling far enough and perhaps you meet the first group again. Not because you know less, but because you no longer need your knowledge to establish who you are.

The world has a peculiar relationship with intelligent people. It often behaves as though unusual ability creates an obligation to spend your life solving everyone else’s problems. It doesn’t. Your mind is still your own. Your time is still your own. Intelligence does not create a debt that must be repaid through productivity. We have the same right as anyone else to sit beside a baseball field and do absolutely nothing useful. And perhaps doing something “useful” for the world is not always more valuable anyway. There are other ways to spend a life. Giving love to the people immediately around you may ultimately be a more worthy career than sitting in an air-conditioned office beneath an impressive title displayed on LinkedIn. Modern culture has lost sight of that. We have become extraordinarily good at measuring accomplishment and remarkably bad at measuring a life.

Maybe progress is not always moving farther away from where we began. Sometimes you travel all the way around the world intellectually only to discover that what you were looking for was already there: families cheering, people loving one another, and a baseball game on a Wednesday night. And perhaps the same curve applies not only to individual people, but to civilization itself. We may be somewhere in the enormous middle right now, mistaking technological saturation for technological maturity. We have become sophisticated enough to place a computer between ourselves and nearly every human experience, but perhaps not yet sophisticated enough to realize that the highest purpose of technology may eventually be to remove itself from those experiences.

That is the contradiction I keep returning to. Humanity needs technology, and I want its capabilities to advance far beyond anything that exists today. But I’m increasingly unsure that we need computers to become the space in which human beings communicate, socialize, form relationships, maintain friendships, seek attention, establish status, construct identities, argue, flirt, fall in love, entertain one another, and experience community with people who are not physically in front of them. Maybe there is another world line where technology advances hundreds of years beyond where we are today, yet computers largely disappear from human social life. They still discover medicines, design materials, manage energy grids, solve mathematics, automate industry, navigate spacecraft, and expand the boundaries of human knowledge. They may become unimaginably more capable than anything we have today. But we stop using them as the place where human relationships happen.

Maybe the networks become primarily machine-to-machine rather than human-to-human. Computers remain available to humans for basic functions and intellectual exploration, but they are no longer the social environment in which we perform our identities, maintain friendships, seek validation, argue with strangers, fall in love, or experience community. If you want to talk to someone, you go see them. If you want community, you leave your house. If you want to know your neighbors, you walk outside. Technology becomes extraordinarily advanced precisely so that human beings can become less technological. Perhaps that is what a mature technological civilization actually looks like.

We tend to imagine progress as technology becoming increasingly visible: more screens, more interfaces, more devices, more augmentation, more of our lives moving into machines. Maybe we have it backward. Perhaps sufficiently advanced technology eventually becomes invisible. The machines become incomprehensibly capable in the background while human life becomes physical again. The future doesn’t culminate in everyone wearing increasingly sophisticated computers on their faces. It culminates in no longer needing to look at a computer.

And maybe on that world line, a Wednesday-night baseball game looks almost exactly as it did forty years ago: families sitting together, children running around, people cheering for someone they know, and nobody looking at a screen. Behind them exists a civilization hundreds of years more technologically advanced than ours. But between them, there is nothing.

That sounds like a better world.