Fate, Computation, Purpose
One hundred years from now, how might historians describe the first decades of the twenty-first century? Hopefully not as an age that lost its grip on meaning or abandoned reason, but as a moment when human-engineering outran the purposes meant to guide it. Our time may look less like a crisis of meaning than a crisis of purpose.
We now use computational power to alter the pace of processes that once set the tempo of human life. We edit genomes, accelerate production, transmit signals at the speed of electricity, and capture attention with algorithms that assemble data faster than human perception can experience.
These capacities do not simply help us understand the world; they allow us to shape what comes next—to pull more and more of what we once called fate and destiny into the expanding scope of human purpose.
This is possible because computation is not an artificial force imposed on an otherwise noncomputational world. It works because natural processes unfold through repeatable patterns—cycles, thresholds, feedback loops—that can be discerned, tested, and run forward. Intelligence grows by noticing those patterns, experimenting with the rules that govern their repetition, and adjusting the tempos set by nature alone.
This seems to be the kind of creature Homo sapiens has become: one capable of navigating complexity by forming purposes and constructing intentional paths through it. We succeed not by mastering the world from outside, but because our intelligence and the world share a deep structural kinship.
That kinship is what gives us computational power over how time unfolds.
As Sara Walker writes, ‘That our technology can capture such a deep regularity of nature and use this knowledge to cause things to happen is a highly nontrivial feature of our universe’ (Life as No One Knows It, 143).
Or, as the late Michel Serres once wrote, ‘technology places us before the horizon of our universality . . . . we are only wagering that we are of the same order, as though equipotent’ (The Incandescent, 134-5).
The emerging realization that our computational technologies wield this power along with the simultaneous anxiety that this power may be outrunning our understanding of it creates a sense of anxiety as well as hope.
This is why I shy away from diagnoses of post-truth, meaning crisis, or the death of reason. Such diagnoses moralize symptoms without fully reckoning with history—or with the kind of creatures we are becoming and the powers we invent.
The challenge before us is not to recover meaning, but to learn how to live with the purposes our powers now make possible.
Putting This in Practice
Attentiveness: As you move through the world today, take note of your encounters with computational power. When the moment strikes you, slow down to look deeper find its hidden manifestations.
Read more from the Wednesdays series.
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