Author: Minh Do

The central question of this era just might be how do we co-exist with AI? AI presents manifold challenges to human identity. The prospect of an entity or series of entities that exceed human intelligence, intuition, creativity, and even empathy, in every possible way already feels like a singularity in 2024, it’s bewildering imagining what this could look like in 2034, let alone 2044. 2004 seems like yesterday by comparison.

In many ways, we already live in a singularity of sorts, a point at which we cannot predict nor comprehend what happens next. Somewhere between 2001 and 2024, the world became incoherent, the zeitgeist became impossible to pinpoint, and the maelstrom of information overwhelmed us absolutely. There are moments when things seem to feel coherent, flash points and lightning rods that seem to be a focal point for news, social media focus, and global conversation. 9/11! Arab Spring! Ukraine/Russia! January 6th! Sam Altman was fired! These were all moments that seemed to signify a flash point that symbolized those eras, a crystallization of themes and actors, but those eras come and go so fast now, what did they really signify? The moments and themes weave in and out of each other so exponentially and so fast that there’s little to no coherency. I think we underestimate the extent to which our own bubble amplifies the things we think are important and symbolic. And all of these moments get swept up by the next thing. We can’t stay on one point, we can’t connect the dots into themes. The theme is chaos.

It’s within that above context that AI arrives on our shores. And I don’t think scifi really prepared us for this. It’s fascinating that scifi narratives obsessed so much over space, dystopia, and robots but only a few really explored the implications of things like the internet, mobile phones, and now AI that can do nearly everything we thought humans were good at. It’s like that adage, when they were building the highways, no one could have predicted Walmart. The knock-on effects of systemic change are unpredictable and AI is a systemic change of exponential proportions.

We already live in a world that is too complex for our Cro-Magnon brains to comprehend, how do we expect to interact with entities that are trained on that very world we’re overwhelmed by? Our brains are wholly unprepared for a world seasoned with AI over everything. It’s going to be the ubiquitous ingredient. Or will the opposite occur, by funneling an overwhelming world through the filter of AI, will the world thereby become more lucid and simple to our feeble minds? Everyday, we use algorithms in social media and media to serve to us the portions of information that we can digest. The front page of my life is mediated absolutely by AI. Without those algos, the world seems incomprehensible and overwhelming. At the same time, generative AI content is leading to an explosion of content that will inevitably explode this information overload even further. It seems to me the entropy of humanity is further sociological and information complexity. 

So where does that really leave us? We’re going to be in an uneasy relationship with AI where we ask it to help us comprehend what’s going on in the world (not just by interpreting but also funneling us to the people who can interpret that world) while it simultaneously causes the world to be more complex with not just the creation of synthetic data, etc. but also its unpredictable Walmart-like knock-on effects. It’s the elephant in the room that takes over the whole room.

That’s why I think this project of co-existing with AI is so futile. You’re damned if you do use AI and you’re damned if you don’t use AI. The Pandora’s Box allegory never felt so pertinent. A scenario in which the moment you open the box, everything changes and you can’t look back. We’re here now, strap in.

I watched or rewatched a few space films and TV shows recently, including For All Mankind, Interstellar, Ad Astra, 3Body Problem, etc. and it reignited an idea I’ve been sitting on for awhile. In essence, I believe that we will need massive (and arguably scary levels of) advancements in AI to colonize other planets and moons. 

I mean, it’s absolutely impressive that we landed on the moon 6 times with 12 people and with computer processing power equal to less than the CPU in my handheld phone. But we are very far from terraforming the moon or Mars. No doubt, the technology exists to land on them. But watching all these sci-fi shows really impressed upon me the hairsbreadth of margin of error for all the different things we have to do in space. It’s a marvel of human ingenuity and brilliance that we have satellites and space stations at all. But the number of people who have reached earth orbit is below 1,000 (exactly 622 people have reached earth orbit). That just underlines how hard it is to get people who can really handle space, and this cannot scale. A very specific set of specialized and physically fit people can be in space. And that does not scale. How are we going to send people to space en masse and colonize the solar system without a large pool of people fit to be in space and a surplus of technology and rockets to send out there? It doesn’t add up. 

For this reason, I sadly think we will not see terraforming in my lifetime. If I manage to be fit and outlive my parents or grandparents, maybe that’s another 40-50 years. In that time period, it’s hard to imagine humanity mass producing capable AI-enabled robots that could take care of all the things we’d need to construct, excavate, and terraform another planetary body. Especially, because it takes us 5-10 years just to send one out (Perseverance rover was planned in 2012 and launched in 2020 and cost $2.7 billion dollars). Our manufacturing and technological capabilities are just not there. 

This doesn’t even address the large mountain we need to climb in terms of research and development progress we need to make in AI. We need to create an AI that is not just capable of successfully docking spacecraft in the difficulty of space, but we also need something that can handle highly intelligent autonomous tasks without the guidance of humans for hours to years on end. This is a far cry from being able to chat with ChatGPT or beating a Starcraft 2 pro player. Now, this begs the question, how advanced do we need them to be? 

Is sentience a requirement for AI that can do things we need? Or barring that, is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) a requirement? What is the threshold for AI that is sufficiently capable of helping us colonize and where is the beginning of a dangerous AI that could wipe us out? Are those lines closer than we think? Or are they actually quite far away from each other? It’s an interesting needle to thread because we need an AI that is enormously capable enough to help us terraform and bring us into space, but we also don’t want an AI that is intelligent enough to wipe us out. I like to think of this as a “Vital Margin”, the margin between an AI that is so intelligent that it can help us to forward our race to the far future, which is absolutely vital for our long term survival as a spacefaring race, and an AI that is so intelligent that it could destroy us with a mere thought if it deemed it was needed or possible. 

This might be obvious to fans of 2001: A Space Odyssey where HAL is so advanced that it attempts to eliminate the humans which it deems are not capable of completing the mission. HAL, in its own misguided sense of silicon confidence, surmised that it was the one capable of completing this mission alone. Setting that terrible premise aside, wouldn’t we want an AI that was that confident, or rather capable, in its abilities to take on a mission of that scale? Why does Cooper in Interstellar have to embark to faraway planets and black holes to gather data and terraform when a sufficiently advanced AI could do so? 

In any case, the question that presses on me the most is that margin between supremely helpful for survival versus apocalyptic Terminator/Matrix outcomes. 

But here’s the big caveat in my head: the rarity of intelligent life. I really have to credit Liu Cixin’s 3 Body Problem for these thoughts. The trilogy got me thinking deeply about how rare intelligent life is and combined with one of my favorite science books, 10 Innovations of Evolution. No doubt, probabilistically, intelligent life outside of us Homo Sapiens is likely. But it must be extremely rare! After all, life has been on earth for 3.6 billions years. Intelligent life even close to our level of intelligence appeared less than 100 millions years ago, and likely maybe less than 3 million years ago. That is incredibly incredibly rare, and the number of extinction events that life survived to get here, so frequent. For these reasons and many more, it has molded my thinking that intelligent life is incredibly precious and rare and supremely worth preserving. 

Within that context of rarity of life, if humanity perishes, can a highly intelligent AI be a legacy we leave behind? In other words, even if we go over that vital margin from helpful to apocalyptic, is the optimistic way to view this that at least we’ve left behind an intelligent life form on par with us that has a higher chance of survivability? And therefore, that synthetic AI is the residue that we can leave behind to other civilizations which may one day encounter our knowledge and wisdom. Can AI be that advanced version of what we attempted to put into Voyager 1 for some far off alien race to find in the absence of us? 

I think that also means that, in either case, we’re stuck with AI.

1. We need AI to survive and thrive, in a world that is at risk of climate change, etc. (a topic for another time).
2. We need AI to terraform and populate the planets.
3. If AI destroys us or we get destroyed, we might need it to continue our legacy into an infinite universe.

It’s a Catch-22. There’s no escaping it.

Everyone Needs Therapy in a Global Mental Health Crisis?

I think, globally, we have a mental health crisis. We have billions of people on earth grappling with a rapidly changing globalizing competitive world, geopolitical conflicts, an addictive internet, and an unclear picture of what jobs will look like in the near or far future. And this is just a taste of the many things a modern human has to deal with. For this reason, I think everyone on earth should be in therapy.

It’s interesting that if I told you that I’m in therapy, some people would react with judgment, they would assume something is wrong with me (part of the assumption being there is nothing wrong with them). And another set of people would be impressed with me, that I have a certain amount of maturity to work on myself. This dichotomy is fascinating. And I think it is largely molded by our cultures and attitudes. If you are generally from an older generation or you’re from a non-Western culture, it is very likely that therapy is alien to you.

If you come from a religious background or embraced a religion, it’s likely religion plays its part as your therapy. Why would you need therapy if your priest or monk already fills that void for you? And in our modern era, if religion was Marx’s opiate of the masses in the 19th century, I think it’s social media that has come to replace religion as our opiate.

Religion as Therapy

But the thing about religion, although the philosophy and methodologies are sometimes ancient and powerful, the methodologies haven’t been through the ringer of science the way therapy has. Religions are founded on unverified metaphysics likes heavens, hells, and supernatural occurrences. Therapy, unlike religion, is founded on principles that are themselves subject to the scientific method. So although religion can be a salve and be helpful to people, it also has the potential to repress depending on the values of said religion. Is it any surprise that multiple religions have repressed male leadership that are found to be sexual deviants? Many religions are founded within a chauvinistic context, is there no surprise that it would result in chauvinistic views or practices?

Even I have to admit that Buddhism, hailed by many in the modern era as their favorite religion, leans male over female. The resulting advice from a monk, depending on the query, might be sexist in nature. How much more so religions, which are rooted in an explicitly male divine figure?

Before we depart from the religion topic though, and before I get flamed for this post, I do admit that religions are trying to update themselves to modern science as their followers demand it, in an increasingly technological and scientific world. And of course, the even bigger caveat that religions have also been the fountain of a lot of good values in this world, you could even argue that without religion there would not be enough of a philosophical structure to guide the moral compass of humans, who can be essentially driven by selfishness, greed, and lust. At the same time, I think that religion is ill equipped for the deepening mental health crisis that many individuals face across the world. Indeed, it may be exacerbating a person’s mental tapestry.

Social Media as Therapy

I’m not sure social media is any better. In fact, it’s probably worse. After all, social media was never designed to be therapeutic. Despite this, people treat it as their salve for their psychological needs. Have a private matter you are dealing with? Make a social media post. Have some interpersonal issue with a family member? Go to your socials. Have an issue with society? Go complain to your internet friends. People get their dopamine kicks and their psychological itches out in social media, but if anything, it only serves to amplify our psychoses, not heal them.

Not to mention the fact that social media itself is designed by product people and building, in part, on the work of psychologists. You could argue that social media is designed to be addictive, causing users to return to their phones over and over again. People go crazy on social media. They find a home for their psychoses there. They find and meet very close friends but they also find predators there. It has all the extremes and it’s most on display in the extremes of porn and the dark holes of 4chan. It’s no wonder that something like the Qanon conspiracy could come into fruition online. It plays into the fear, trauma, and paranoia of a whole generation of people.

Therapy is Flawed

I don’t mean to rail religion and social media not forgetting that therapy is itself fundamentally flawed. There are plenty of situations where therapists are guilty of many of the things I’ve accused religion or social media. It also takes forever to find the right therapist, and even then, it’s possible that therapist isn’t right for you. And then there are all the different methodologies of therapy, many of which might not work for you. 

So even if you get over the hump of culture and stigma that would prevent you from going to therapy, there’s no guarantee that you will even find the right therapy or therapist for you. 

Therapy Doesn’t Scale

Having said that, I think therapy is built on principles that I think are more modern and rigorous than philosophies or frameworks as old as religion. Therapy has also evolved considerably since the era of Freud, adapting to different cultures, types of people, and new science. Therapy has never been better. But maybe for that exact reason, it doesn’t scale. It’s not like a vaccine that a concentrated group of scientists pioneer and then can distribute to billions of people in record time.

Therapists themselves are humans, subject to ego and all the things that any religious figure is. It’s expensive. Therapy is also largely a Western conception and accepted mainly in Western contexts. It’s simply not acceptable nor palatable in cultures where admitting that you have something wrong with you is taboo or passé. 

All of this makes me skeptical about the long-term growth of therapy. Religion is still growing rapidly everyday. And social media is in the hands of anyone that has a smartphone, which is billions of people on earth. Religion and social media both scale infinitely. Even in western societies, we have a shortage of therapists and mental health professionals. There simply aren’t enough mental health professionals to help with the sheer number of people who have mental issues. 

And yet, I really believe that therapy is important to the maturity of humanity. I think everyone should go to therapy. After all, it’s what people turned to when it’s too late. When your relationship is falling apart, the last resort is therapy. Something you should have gotten into before things started falling apart.

Meditation and Psychedelics: Imperfect Replacements

I suppose this is why I’m excited about meditation and psychedelics. But they’re imperfect replacements for therapy. 

Meditation Is Too Self-Driven

With meditation, something I’ve been studying my entire life, it suffers from the same issues as therapy. It doesn’t scale. In some cases, it’s actually not good for someone who is suffering from certain mental issues. Not to mention that there are so many types of meditation, it’s not a one-size-fits-all. Finding the right therapist is as tedious if not more tedious than finding the right meditation technique for you. And ultimately, meditation is too self-driven. Sticking to meditation is as hard as developing a proper workout practice. And finding the right teacher is as hard as finding the right therapist, and they’re frankly even less trained, since there is no formal meditation profession at the level of therapy. And on top of it all, there is no guarantee that it will help because the methods might not be right for the internal issues.

And like religion, meditation is founded on principles rooted in a different philosophy that does not account for the revelations and theses out of the psychological and social sciences. Meditation was not engineered with the subconscious in mind as it was conceived by Freud and his descendants. And it’s rare for serious meditators to discuss topics of trauma, emotions, etc. in the way that therapists are equipped to.

Psychedelics are Too Risky (and Don’t Scale Safely)

Psychedelics have lately become the focus of great interest from the scientific and therapeutic communities, beyond just recreational use. In many cities of America, we’re starting to see legal therapeutic uses of psychedelics to help people with trauma and other psychological issues. In many ways, MDMA, Ketamine, or Shrooms can supercharge your therapeutic process, helping you to deal with PTSD, depression, addiction, etc. on an accelerated path. Even more so with a therapist, who can guide you through the experience.

And although I love psychedelics, I’m not sure how this works given the inherent danger psychedelics can have without supervision. The differential of .1g of shrooms to 2g of shrooms is the difference between a cup of coffee and a massive psychotic episode. 

It’s also very sensitive. Most psychedelics need to be taken in a safe and secure environment. Taking them in the wrong environment, even for experienced users, can be jarring and at worst, traumatic. They could essentially cause people worse mental health issues than they started with. Thus, if that’s the case, even if psychedelics get legalized and widely approved in therapeutics across the US and globally, there’s no real path towards scale here. Ultimately, psychedelics need to be administered under supervision.

No Therapy, No Meditation, No Psychedelics

Taking all of these things into account, it’s hard to imagine a case where humanity gets the therapeutic help it needs for the onslaught of stress, anxiety, and emotional turmoil that is about to beset it. We cannot train therapists fast enough, we cannot train meditators fast enough, and we cannot administer psychedelics safely at scale. Instead, we have the imperfect and fast-growing entities of social media, religion, entertainment, and more to soothe our souls.

This doesn’t fill me with much hope for the future of mental health on the planet. But it does make me wonder what is the future of mental health on the planet, and how important it is that we make progress in the neurosciences.

In some ways, my hope isn’t that we have more widespread usage of psychedelics, it’s my hope that widespread scientific enquiry into neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, and psychedelics leads to a breakthrough in brain science that is on par with the theory of relativity, a theory so powerful and profound that it completely changes the way the whole world looks at the mind and the brain. I think that’s the only way we can climb the mountain of our sleeping giant of a mental health crisis.

I think most people don’t know how to travel. They think they do. They book their tickets, they get on their planes, they enjoy themselves. They look around. And they come home, and they think “I understood this place, I got to know this place.”

But is that really travel?

Honestly, I personally don’t like traveling. So who am I to even write this? I don’t like the entire process. I hate getting into the cab, or the Uber. I hate getting to the airport, I hate going through customs. I hate arriving. I hate jet lag. I hate being tired in a new place. I hate adjusting to a new place. I hate all of that. But I have lived in new places. And that’s what I do love, the “being there” of it all.

And what I think I do know how to do is to sink into a place at least the few places that I’ve been to. And it’s that sinking in, which has given me a new appreciation for traveling to a new place that I crave and that I wish upon everyone.

Nowadays, coming into into any new city, I find the process of getting to know that city is always regulated with a sense of humility. Truth is I cannot know any place completely. After all, do I even know the place that I live in? I may have a sense of a thread of it. But living in a city as large as Los Angeles, how much of it can I really get? 

I got recently into a debate with a few friends about how hard it can be to stay up to date on trends, themes, and the general zeitgeist. And what’s happening next. They argued that it is possible to have a sense of things, an intuition about what’s hot, by following social media, news, and other conversations. But I also wonder sometimes if does the historian have a different kind of edge on what’s happening today? 

There’s something to be said for the difference between the person that immerses in everything that is happening now versus the person that immerses themselves in the history of how we got to where we are.  Because the former people are going to know the exact emergent trends, the players that made them possible, and the stories that currently ignite the minds of the world. They are in the conversation. But then, there’s the longer arc of conversation that humanity has been having with itself for millennia, so the current trends sit against a backdrop of human nature, innovation, and narratives. Sometimes knowing the long arc of how we got here gives you a better view on what is happening now. 

This thought made me think, what would I prefer? All in on the now, or all in on the past that got us to now? After all, the present can be a blinder, or a frog in the well. And thus, from that dialectic, I think about how can I really know Los Angeles? I know that I barely know the neighborhood I live in. I don’t know my neighborhoods history, and I certainly don’t know the histories of all the neighborhoods that amount to Los Angeles, and I must trust the words of others to arrive at understanding what is the vibe or thematics of LA. I mean, every time I talk to someone who has been in LA has a different take on what LA is (to them) and what is important to know about the city. No one has the same take. It’s even more stark when I have friends visiting from out of town. One person says LA people are so nice and friendly, another person says they’re aggressive. Does the city have schizophrenia?

I think if someone is intellectually honest, then they have to grant that their perspective on even the city that they live in is hardly a complete picture or an authoritative picture. If it is that hard to understand a city that one lives in, it is even harder for a place we visit for a week, two weeks, three weeks, months, or even years. And with even less geographical exposure than your home city!

If the intellect will fail me, as far as understanding a city is concerned, it comes back to feelings and emotions. When I travel to a city, I am struck by the the feeling of being in that city. I’m struck by the vibe, so to speak of that city, as opposed to the vibes of a different city. But do I take that next step and let that vibe seep into me? Do I let my travels change my perspective? Do I let my city change my perspective?

This all begs the question, what is the approach that one should take for a given city, right? How should one look upon a new city? And get the most out of it? If I grant that, whatever place I’m going to, I’m only going to get a sliver of it, I’m only going to get a very small piece of it, then how do I approach that travel experience? 

I think this can become a profound question. If one ends up going to a place, let’s say for two weeks, what does that even mean? What am I going to get out of two weeks, coming to a place, I’m going to enjoy some food, I’m going to get a very small sliver of a sense of what that country is like, but I’m gonna go home to my bubble. Will that place change me? Will that change my perspective on where I currently live? Or will I easily sink into perspectives on what that place is?

I think that’s really the crux of what I think should actually happen, I think people should be allowing their city to change them. Their travel should change them too. Because I think that’s the spice of life. I think that’s what ideally leads to a more holistic approach to life in an ideal sense. Now, I don’t know if that’s possible. For the average person, I barely think it’s possible for me, but I think it’s something worth striving for. And I think it only starts with recognizing you’ll never know a place, let alone, your own.

Thanks for reading!

Obligatory AI image generated from: “travel in your own city”.