I know, that’s not the final religion you were hoping for. But that’s where
you went wrong: hoping.
Don’t lament the loss of your own agency. If submitting to artificial
algorithms sounds awful, understand this: you already do. And you like it.
The algorithms already run much of our lives. The route you took to work
is based on an algorithm. Many of the friends you talked to this week? Those
conversations were based on an algorithm. The gift you bought your kid, the
amount of toilet paper that came in the deluxe pack, the fifty cents in savings
you got for being a rewards member at the supermarket—all the result of
algorithms.
We need these algorithms because they make our lives easier. And so will
the algorithm gods of the near future. And as we did with the gods of the
ancient world, we will rejoice in and give thanks to them. Indeed, it will be
impossible to imagine life without them.^10 These algorithms make our lives
better. They make our lives more efficient. They make us more efficient.
That’s why, as soon as we cross over, there’s no going back.We Are Bad Algorithms
Here’s one last way to look at the history of the world:
The difference between life and stuff is that life is stuff that self-replicates.
Life is made out of cells and DNA that spawn more and more copies of
themselves.
Over the course of hundreds of millions of years, some of these primordial
life forms developed feedback mechanisms to better reproduce themselves.
An early protozoon might evolve little sensors on its membrane to better
detect amino acids by which to replicate more copies of itself, thus giving it
an advantage over other single-cell organisms. But then maybe some other
single-cell organism develops a way to “trick” other little amoeba-like things’
sensors, thus interfering with their ability to find food, and giving itself an
advantage.
Basically, there’s been a biological arms race going on since the beginning
of forever. This little single-cell thing develops a cool strategy to get more
material to replicate itself than do other single-cell organisms, and therefore it
wins the resources and reproduces more. Then another little single-cell thing
evolves and has an even better strategy for getting food, and it proliferates.
This continues, on and on, for billions of years, and pretty soon you have
lizards that can camouflage their skin and monkeys that can fake animal
sounds and awkward middle-aged divorced men spending all their money on