Life at the Speed of Computation

The purpose statement from issue 1 of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog

In any long form conversation with anyone on the front lines of AI, the conversation will range through morality, economics, religion, evolution, culture, nature, Utopian prophecies, the nature of time, the nature of intelligence, the nature of humanity, the nature of consciousness. These topics are profoundly changed in this absorption—they become problems that either are or will be brought into the scope of computational power.1

This capacity for absorption is worth listening to as it is a defining feature of our time.

In 1994, I called this power of absorption Infrastructures of Enlightenment’. I saw the building of roads, the transformation of the printing business, and the creation and circulation of new kinds of information in the British eighteenth century as a new and accelerating capacity to remake the world by gathering everything into the infrastructure. What else was the British Empire but the massive investment and extension of this infrastructure over the world?

During my dissertation defense, I speculated that we were entering a new phase of acceleration with the emergence of digital technologies.2

Since then, I’ve spent thirty years working within the digital revolution. Along the way, I’ve watched (and participated in) big tech becoming infrastructure in ways far more pervasive than even the Enlightenment sought. Today, big tech has the capacity to absorb nearly every aspect of life, filter it, and transform it.

The speed at which it moves now defines our time out of joint. The solution cannot be simply to slow down.

This Substack, Time Out of Joint, and my other project, Time as Practice, have become the next chapter in my rumination and meditations on making sense of the acceleration of infrastructure.

Changing the Nature of Time

We are changing the nature of time itself. This is more than a shift in how we experience time—we are altering how time works.

Evolution is a good example. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) reframed time as a natural process of variation and selection: organisms change, and their environments decide which changes endure.

This long, slow process stretched time: the Earth was no longer a few thousand years old, as in Biblical reckoning, but millions—later billions—of years, shaped by forces far beyond human control.

Jennifer A. Doudna and Samuel H. Sternberg, the inventors of the gene-editing tool CRISPR, summarize Darwinian evolution in Crack in Creation:

The biological world is also undergoing profound, human-induced changes. For billions of years, life progressed according to Darwin’s theory of evolution: organisms developed through a series of random genetic variations, some of which conferred advantages in survival, competition, and reproduction. Up to now, our species too has been shaped by this process…

CRISPR brings about a profound change in the control sequence:

Today, things could not be more different. Scientists have succeeded in bringing this primordial process fully under human control.3

This is not just a change in how time is experienced; it is a change in how time works.

Humans can now use computational power to remake evolutionary time in our own image. Gene-editing turns evolution it into a human-led process—a process that no longer requires millennia to fine tune an organism to an environment.

To say ‘fully under human control’ might be overstating it a bit, but the absorptive intent is captured, and the trajectory of time is defined as the ongoing increase in the scope and reach of this power.

The depth and breadth of this change in the nature of time is profound. In Darwin’s temporality, evolution advances through unintended variation, and nature does the active work of selecting traits that grant reproductive advantage. As Doudna and Sternberg point out, ‘indeed, until recently we were largely at [evolution’s] mercy’ (7).

In the new formulation, human intention can drive much of the process from here on out. Evolution now can move at the speed of human decision-making.

To say that our experience of time has changed is to undersell the magnitude of the prophecy. By taking control of evolutionary time—and fundamentally re-engineering it—humanity can make evolution move much faster.

So, when I say that our computational power can absorb everything—as infrastructure—this is a primary example of what I mean. Not even the process of evolution—billions of years old—is outside this power of computational absorption by human ingenuity.

Revaluation of Values

When we learn to listen to the prophecies that surround our computational power—and pronouncements about the human control over evolution certainly rise to the level of prophecy—it becomes nearly impossible to deny that we are living in an extraordinary time.

I’m inclined to use Nietzsche’s phrase ‘revaluation of values’, Umwertung aller Werte, as one way to describe the moral implications of our time out of joint.

His phrase is useful because its intent is to make us more attentive to the water in which we are swimming, not to lay out a rigorous theory of moral obligation.4

This series of essays on Rejuvenation has sought to shine some light on the inability for our republican institutions to keep up with the pace of the economic and cultural changes we are moving through. In part, I’m thinking of identity politics, which has stifled our moral composition of time within factional belongings that are a dead-end for history. Nietzsche saw something similar in late nineteenth-century Europe, but his vision carries some baggage about decline and decay that I wish to avoid—his diagnosis was decadence.

I don’t indulge in narratives of decay. They are too totalizing, too self-confident, and far too depressing. They lead to nostalgia and an inability to be attentive to the water in which we swim. Nietzsche had his own problems with this diagnosis, which led him to the confusing prescription of the Übermensch (over-man, super-man) that is too heroic for most of us mortals to achieve.

Nor am I a fan of moral philosophy. I have little, if any, interest in prescriptive moralities that specify the virtues by which I should live (virtue ethics), the duties to which I am obliged (deontology), or the consequences of my actions that I am supposed to be able to see in advance (consequentialism).5

I seek something a bit more practical but also more complex. I would like a moral vision that can move at the speed and scale of the world we are creating.

Death of God

The reason I lean into Nietzsche’s phrase is that it absorbs a few themes that stand out in our time out of joint.

These are big themes that match the magnitude of the changes we are bringing about.

For this essay, I’ll take up the death of God, which is central to Nietzsche vision for revaluing values. Nietzsche classic statement was issued less as a triumph and more as a warning:

What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? . . . This tremendous event is still on its way and wandering—it hasn’t yet reached the ears of human beings. (The Gay Science, §125)

In short, the death of God leaves open a void that humanity was not yet ready to deal with. To take Nietzsche seriously on the death of God is, therefore, to attend to how we deal with this void.

From Marin Heidegger to David Foster Wallace, the death of God meant that our atheistic culture might have stopped believing in a Big Daddy in the Sky, but we still hold open a place for Him—rationality, wealth accumulation, survival of the fittest, or anything that provides some basis for values that transcends mere personal taste.

Real Gods

If we are attentive to how we will deal with this void, the signals are pretty clear, but our modern, atheistic ears have a hard time hearing them.

For ears attentive to the death of God, Doudna and Sternberg have certainly issued a prophecy about humanity becoming godlike in its power over evolution. This is not figurative language. The gods created here are real, not imaginary.

Darwin played an important role in the death of God. He made God imaginary by making evolution real. We have reversed this proposition: we have made God real by making evolution imaginary.

Let me be clear about what I mean. After Darwin, any professed belief in God as creator and redeemer of humankind could only be treated as a figment of a deluded (non-scientific) imagination. This was the coffin lid sliding into place. For the Middle Ages, God remained very real and in control of the movement of history. The End of Time (the eschaton, in theological terms) structured everyone’s understanding of time. Even Martin Luther, as late as the sixteenth century, thought that the end of time was imminent.6

With Darwin, this understanding of time, and therefore God, becomes unscientific and therefore imaginary. Evolution is real.

But Doudna and Sternberg announce a very real God—scientists wielding editing power over genes. Evolution now becomes something that we can imagine and then engineer our way toward what we imagine. Do you need a mouse in your lab who has the capacity to no longer experience hunger? Just place the order.

Wielding godlike power forces morality onto the human agenda:

With our mastery over the code of life comes a level of responsibility for which we, as individuals and as a species, are woefully unprepared. (105)

The echoes of Nietzsche resound, though maybe not explicitly.

Isn’t the magnitude of this deed too big for us? Don’t we have to become gods ourselves just to seem worthy of it? (Gay Science §125)

This is not an isolated incident, and I’m not the first to point out this general trajectory of history. Yuval Noah Harari’s bestseller Homo Deus makes precisely this case: ‘And having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods, and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.7

Again, this upgrade is a movement from imaginary gods to literal ones.

We are as gods…

In 1968, as the modern computational power of technology was just beginning its acceleration into infrastructure, Stewart Brand crafted the purpose statement for The Whole Earth Catalog. It begins with this famous line:

We are as gods and might as well get good at it.

Not ‘like’ gods, but ‘as’ gods—literally and truly we are operating as gods because we have invented powers that we once imagined only possible in the hands of God.

The imaginary is becoming real, and the real is becoming imaginary. We live in a time out of joint.