The Race
An aging, chubbing man embarks on a half marathon while contemplating AI, consciousness and human solidarity
One of the worst things that digital technology has done is to disconnect us from writing.
If you think in terms of competing content delivery systems, then the idea of sitting for hours looking at a blank page or a blinking cursor, with an empty brain and a string of words you already don’t like, seems pointless. Inefficient.
This word, “efficiency”, will be the death of us.
Many people who have found success, of one kind or another, say it came down to building a tiny model of the world in their minds. A simplifying exercise where you decide that only two or three things matter, require constant attention, so expend all resources towards that. Anything else encountered, is to be ignored, avoided or attended only in spirit.
We shape our buildings and then they shape us.
The issue arises when people start believing that their model train set, a rough schema of the world, is in fact a shared reality for everyone else. “Where is that train headed, it’s on a loop right?”
Simplified, outdated or unfounded models of other people’s behaviour or motivations get us in trouble. The bigger the model, the harder the fall.
Increasingly we hear spectacular claims about machine intelligence in competition with human intelligence. A nation of PhD-level researchers, an army of agents, at the cost of a single high-level professional, a well-paid job. A sprawling maze of data centres, doing all our homework, drinking up lakes and oceans. An economy of tireless,
dispassionate actors replacing real people first in commerce, and eventually in the role of their lives. Every vision that has been publicly articulated is an acid trip, if a bit two-dimensional and bewilderingly short-sighted.
Examined closely, it reveals quite a reductive conception of intelligence and human consciousness. It posits that intelligence is simply a function of the volume and speed of information that can be processed.
All of life and its ambiguity, reduced to an optimising equation. Scale it. Keep adding compute. Super Intelligence emerges. That’s the prevailing theory that many have bet billions on. Let’s see.
There is a profound difference between data and wisdom, as anyone with a teabag but without boiling water or a cup can tell you. As for consciousness, how can you reconstruct or improve on an elegant structure if you do not truly understand its foundations or the materials it is composed of ? Perhaps this is why some now talk of “growing” rather than “building” machine intelligence.
I recently had the privilege of participating in a half marathon. A grey chubbing bushel of wheat, an upright seal, washed up from the waters of Ireland, competing en France. À Paris!
Totally brained it.
I stayed up till 3 the night before creating a playlist, lacked hydration, forgot suncream. The second I saw people amassed in their hundreds, all pointed towards a positive end, in the Paris sunlight, some long-forgotten chemical diffused into my brain, informing me that I was Usain Bolt.
I discarded 3 months of gentle, incremental pace training from a couch potato position. Two weeks out, we ventured from Milltown to Sandymount strand, a first 15k run. I sported a slow, swaggering, Mr Burns gait with accompanying grunts and feeble whistles. I just about made it home that evening.
The adrenaline will carry you on the day, they say.
I gassed my fat ass sprinting at the speed of light for one minute. I hadn’t experienced that level of exciting group exercise or positive community in aeons. I came to, only to realise that I was entirely depleted. There was 20k to go.
Hell.
We are social animals. As my rasher slowly fried, I scanned the flock to identify similar, ready-made boil in the bag zombies. Discards from the assembly line. Delirium. Then you enter a kind of meditation.
Every 5 kilometres, I’d approach a set of tables, a brass band, cheering crowds, without adequate refuelling gear.
Parched, burnt and blinded. An ominous line of volunteers would direct a hose at my face and mouth area. Then spray intensely for a few seconds. Like I was a horse. Or a donkey.
When your resolve plummeted, you’d catch sight of a father running in honour of a lost child, a smiling cherub emblazoned on his t-shirt, someone wheeling a partner, or people just struggling who were carrying more wheat than me. As we dipped and panted below bridges, you’d constantly track people in your wheelhouse.
I won’t give up. If they don’t give up.
There were twins. One was a serial runner. The other was on 3% battery, with a long way to go.
She staggered erratically, like a wounded deer, stunned from a gunshot.
I was moving so slowly that they could perform an opera around me. They would run vigorously for a stretch, the athletic sister half carrying the other. Then they’d overtake me. I’d pass them a few moments later sitting by the side of the road, imploring, crying, motivating. Drinking water.
Me shuffling past, a discarded wine bottle bobbing up the Seine. Then they would rise, regain inspiration and surge past. At the finishing line, with no discussion, we all embraced. Then parted.
As much as I am not a runner, there is something spiritual in that process.
The last stretch is disorientating. Early finishers start running backwards. You meet streets without barriers where ordinary people are just getting on with their lives. Bemused eyes look on from bars. Emotional thoughts rise to the surface. You picture family members, forgotten friends and acknowledge unresolved sadness.
Your body keeps the score, so a physical ordeal after a great slumber, exhumes some of life’s ghosts. But your systems are in critical. Just don’t stop moving. Lights flashing. “Snake!”
The feeling upon finishing and embracing my other half. The post-race meal, fully deserved, delivered slowly, savoured between bloated, cathartic chats. Mission accomplished, I can see why they do it.
We are still capable of coming together and coordinating 50,000 strangers from anywhere, towards a clear goal, for purely positive incentives. Remember that.
Clips have appeared recently of a marathon in China where the people run alongside robots. Can you think of anything more demoralising ?
I’d say, if you are manufactured in an advanced factory, and composed of metal, yet can’t run faster than me, then let’s scrap the entire technological project. In these rare uplifting moments of shared human perseverance, solidarity, that people still enjoy publicly, why is it framed against the backdrop of the evolutionary chain or technological progress ?
You’ve battled against the many seductive, destructive forces that ensnare our minds and bodies, to do something physically healthy, only to be passed by a dispassionate little tin man whizzing along without a soul, coldly repeating something like “stand clear, luggage doors operating”.
There are myriad future worlds we could live in, with varying degrees of technological entanglement and oversight.
Don’t let people convince you that there is just one outcome, or that it is inevitable, where the mass of men live a hollow, haunted existence, severed from nature and one another, strangers in their own skin, while an anointed few live insulated from it all, as petulant, demonic kings.
Ronan Hayes is an entrepreneur and writer with a background in psychology, additive manufacturing and sustainable enterprise. He focuses on the influence of technology on civilisation, group behaviour and the way in which our societies seem to be unravelling. His work strives to make you reflect deeply on a topic and occasionally snort with laughter.
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