In the Zeitgeist (10)

What's on our minds?

Photo by the author

Hello everyone, and welcome back to another issue of In the Zeitgeist.

This one is very much about humanity. What does it say about human understanding, human intellect, if we end up in a world where machines make world shattering discoveries that we won’t even be able to understand? Will the children of stars, humans born on other planets, still be human? We know it’s unethical to experiment on humans, but what about human parts? What happens when the body of a nation is infected with far-right propaganda, where does that leave the humans making up said nation? Let’s explore this together:

1.

There is one little thing that might become big in the near future, a threat that might become a huge headache for science and human understanding. If AI starts making real scientific discoveries, what happens if those discoveries become illegible to us, impossible to understand? We need to start preparing for that scenario right now, to build an infrastructure of legibility, a way of keeping human curiosity in the loop even if machine intelligence races ahead. Because otherwise we’ll be in a “library of Babel” for science type of situation. Fascinating read.

2.

Every story of humanity colonizing space gets it wrong. That’s because it assumes that different planet conditions will not affect humans in any way. In this piece, science headbutts science-fiction with great gusto. If even a sister planet like Mars would have radical effects on human physiology, imagine what something far more different would do. We might colonize space, but in doing so we will give birth to a plethora of species that, given enough time has passed, will resemble the initial human blueprint no more. The children of Mars may very well be unable to visit Earth, can you imagine how that would feel like? Space will rewrite our very DNA.

3.

This is yet another article from what is fast becoming one of my favorite places online. It gives fascinating insight into a field I hadn’t paid much attention to before, forensic archaeology. And it makes it in such a way that I want to know more, find out more stories such as this one, the tragic assassination of a young noble who fell victim to political machinations. We are information when living, we keep being information when dead. History as a crime scene. Fantastic read.

4.

It reads like a horror story, a brainrot meme and satire, all at the same time. Building a human brain cell computer and then using it to play doom (badly). And it’s here where ethics come into play. Is this something we should be doing with human brain cells? Or even with brain organelles? Can we be 100 percent sure there isn’t some trace amount of consciousness in these biological, hand-made objects? How are we avoiding possible suffering, and if we aren’t, why? I wonder if we’re all going to be writing our substacks on bio-computers in the near future. What if we made a bio-computer so advanced that it could run an AI, will that mean we’ve finally invented a… human? Let me know what you think in the comments.

5.

If you’ve vaguely heard about the cancelled elections in Romania and you want to know more about what happened (is happening?) to my country, this is probably the best and only article you need to read. Like everywhere in Europe and the world, this country is also on the way to fall into the far right’s embrace. Our particular version is, as usual, a mix of things that are almost opposites, as you’ll see when you read James Meek’s essay on the matter.

Anyway, plenty to think about. Thanks for reading and don’t forget to subscribe, share, talk about this substack. And if you get value from my work and want to give back, you can buy my book (in Romanian, sorry foreign friends).