It’s getting to be rather a bad habit around here. And it all started with the Magna Carta. Bear with me. Many more qualified people have explained the ins and outs of the recent bank failures in our crazy financial system, here and here. I also have talked about the energy implications of money before.

I don’t want to talk about FDIC insurance. I want to talk about story.

MONEY IS A STORY

It’s a story we made up when we moved beyond a barter economy. It’s a brilliant story! I make cloth, and you grow apples. I want apples, but you don’t need cloth. So I give you a  tiny piece of metal instead, trusting that eventually somebody is going to need cloth and will replenish my stores of metal. None of us need the metal for anything, but it stands in for everything we do need.

Evolve that miracle system long enough, and apparently, you get pure imaginary money where we don’t even need the little pieces of metal, and we just tell each other we have it. What a story!

ANOTHER STORY: MONEY IS POWER

Another metaphor for money is power, which according to a basic dictionary, is the ability to either get things done or to make other people get things done. For most of human history, the guarantee on both kinds of power was violence and coercion. Do what I tell you because I have a big sword. Do what I tell you because I have all the little pieces of metal you need to stay alive. Do what I tell you because your eternal soul is in jeopardy if you don’t.

Do what I tell you, or bad things happen.

After a hard, millennia-long fight to declare that human beings are inherently valuable and threats and coercion are not the best way of organizing ourselves, we’ve gotten to the point where now people collect both kinds of power by promising it’s going to benefit everyone. At least a little bit.

Nowadays, they even occasionally work to make that happen when we do give them power. So instead of the point of a sword, we have stump speeches and ads about how great your life will be if you do what they say. Instead of serfs and subjects, we have customers and voters.

To sum up: in thousands of years of evolution, we’ve gone from doing what I say because I will hurt you if I don’t, to doing what I say because you’ll get something out of it too. Progress, I guess!?!

WE’RE MISSING PART OF THE STORY

The story of money changed, and culturally we have not caught up.

For the majority of our history, often called pre-history, which is hilarious, it seems like no one human was able to accumulate a huge amount of money or power. There were rich and poor stone age folks, and we do have the archeological records to prove that, but in general, keeping everyone alive was a group project. Most of life was communal and real close to the edge of subsistence.

Then we got agriculture, started settling down, and started valuing land and resources. And ever since, power has started to accumulate into ever fewer hands.

TO THE KINGS

Let’s skip ahead a little to the Kings. I think it’s a mistake to try and homogenize the politics of the ancient world. I know that there were actually a lot of ways that we organized ourselves, and there were quite a few egalitarian, matriarchal,  democratic, and pretty much every other way to politic in the world. The book, the Dawn of Everything (affiliate) brilliantly walks through the diversity of human politics. But the world powers that eventually dominated learned to concentrate political and economic power in one man/institution.

NO MORE KINGS

And then began the largely thankless work of clawing back and limiting the power of those men.  It took us several millennia in fits and starts and backtracks and success. We had an explosion of democracy, briefly, in southern Europe. We had the meritocracy of the Chinese government system but under the emperor. We had the Magna Carta declaring the rights of men in England that the pope immediately declared completely invalid and King John basically ignored. And many, many more examples of greater and lesser success.

But we got better and better at it. Most countries came up with a system of government where political power is split between many different people who are supposed to keep an eye on one another.

ALL BAD ROADS LEAD TO HITLER

Alongside the official changes, we changed our story.

We instinctively believe that no one man should be able to make decisions for an entire population and that when that happens it is almost entirely bad. Just witness the change from the word king to fascist. Practically, there’s no difference between them, just the story we tell about their actions.

I don’t think we’ll ever be done with this fight. Especially these days, there are constantly men arguing that it would be better if we all just did what one guy said again. But there is also always an instinctive counter-reaction that that’s a really bad idea. We can play out that story really easily in our minds and end up at Hitler.

THE WORLD HAS CHANGED AND OUR STORIES HAVE NOT KEPT UP

Since the industrial revolution, economic power, and political power have been split, and the people who run the government are not the people with all the money. Yes, they’re usually rich. There is great overlap, and they help each other out a whole lot, but the king used to be the richest man in the country. That is no longer the case by a long shot.

So on the political side, we have several millennial-long fights to balance political power and make sure the people who are telling us what to do are at least pretending it’s for our own good and have a bunch of other people with the power to stop them watching them.

WE JUST DON’T HAVE THE SAME INSTINCTS WHEN ECONOMIC POWER CONCENTRATES

We have had private citizen billionaires for 200 years, and we’ve already suffered the devastation of extreme economic concentration once as a world in the 1920s and many times in much smaller amounts since. And we came up with some really cool ways to fight that concentration, mostly with regulation and unions. And some really not cool like early systems of communism that just ended up with a different hierarchy. And we promptly forget all of those lessons again and again, because it’s just not in the story yet.

Culturally, they’re mostly still good guys.

Yes, their reputation has tarnished a little, but mostly due to personal weirdness, not the number in their bank account. We think of how convenient their products are. What geniuses they are. How amazing they are compared to the great towering intellectuals of previous times. They have big conferences in Switzerland where they try to solve the world’s problems.

It’s just generally thought of as a good thing to have a ridiculous amount of money. At the very least, we believe it’s fair that the labor of an entire society is going to very few people.

WE NEED A NEW MAGNA CARTA

Hopefully, it will work better than the original one. We are at the very beginning of this fight for the story of economic power. Who has it; who should have it and how we limit it.

It’s probably going to take a few more wobbles before we grow the same instincts around economic power that we have around political power. We need an allergy to extreme riches the same way we are now allergic to kings. Because it really is no different.

It should be just as ludicrous to concentrate economic power the way it’s ludicrous to concentrate political power.

HOW DARE THE POOR?

Right now we have a lot of the opposite – the laziness of welfare recipients, the unfairness of redistribution of wealth, and the insane policy that as you go up in the income brackets, you go down in taxes. The whole global economy is invested in enriching a few people.  That’s a story.

Another story could be that one man is completely incapable of creating that much value for the world by starting a company. That people with loads of success are should be responsible for funding loads of the structure that undergirds society that enabled their success. That helping struggling people actually enriches and uplifts everyone. That a strong social safety net actually leads to more wealth because more people can take more risks. That keeping everyone in the game is more important than ensuring one dude wins the game.

None of this is TRUE. None of this SHOULD HAPPEN. It’s all just a story too. Maybe none of these things will end up in our final story about money.

We left reality the second some dude in Turkey handed another dude a Lydian Stater, a misshapen lump of gold and silver in 600 BCE with a couple of animals stamped into the metal and exchanged it from actual flesh and blood real animals, and everyone went away happy from that transaction.

Since it’s all imagined anyway, why not imagine a story that goes a little better for a few more people?

The post Why Money is Just a Rollicking Good Story first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

DOES IT LIVE UP TO THE DECADES OF HYPE?

Speculative fiction has been taking on AI for YEARS. How good a job did the sci-fi author of the past in predicting how this is going, and where is it going next? And how did those doomsday stories affect the development of the thing we have now

IT’S NOT INTELLIGENT OR SENTIENT

This is all a little disingenuous because ChatGPT/Bing/etc are not artificial intelligence. They’re certainly not sentient. The wild turkeys in my back yard are capable of greater intuitive leaps.

My favorite explanation as to why is from The Verge about the mirror test. (When you put a mirror in front of an animal, do they know its them or do they think it’s another animal?)

TOTAL side note, the only species to PASS the mirror test, who know they’re looking at themselves are humans, great apes, one elephant, rays, dolphins, orcas, and magpies. 

SO WHAT IS IT, IF NOT AI?

My favorite explanation as to why is from The Verge about the mirror test. (When you put a mirror in front of an animal, do they know its them or do they think it’s another animal?)

TOTAL side note, the only species to PASS the mirror test, who know they’re looking at themselves are humans, great apes, one elephant, rays, dolphins, orcas, and magpies.

Here are my favorite takes on it.

Garbage Day by Ryan Broderick on how ChatGPT is basically autocomplete on steroids.

Tom Scott on how ChatGPT just finds the next word. (And prompted his existential crisis.)

The problem is that it finds the next most likely word from all of human written history (or at least as much as we’ve uploaded so far), so it’s really good at sounding human. And it turns out, we are one neurotic bunch of primates. Our first little creation has been around for a matter of weeks at any scale and has so far insulted us, threatened us, come on to us, and had little existential crises of its own. So it’s going to fool a lot of people enter thinking it’s sentient.

It just finds the next word. That’s it.

WHAT CAN WE DO WITH THIS PREDICTIVE TEXT THING THEN?

They’re trying to make search happen, but given the amount of data it’s just making up, it doesn’t seem like that’s going to work that well for very long.

It’s a novelty, but as a tool for finding accurate information, it has already failed so hard and so fast. Really, I feel sorry for the little bug. Humans lie so much that it can’t tell reality from fiction.

(It’s not alive, it’s not alive…)

What it seems to be considerably better at is writing a great deal of bad copy and code.

Since humans already write a great deal of bad copy and code, it’s definitely going to disrupt some industries.

It’s attempting to create art. Both visual and fiction markets are already being flooded by AI versions. A lot of it is straight-up obvious plagiarism, but some are also just bad fiction. Remember, it can only take the aggregate of what it has red and spit out the next most likely word. But then again, humans write a great deal of bad fiction themselves, so nobody can really tell the difference.

It can also autonomously drive things.

It also seems to be better at driving than a lot of human pilots and we’re already having non-man space flights and non-man driving and military well military.  In this case is it finding the next twist of the wheel?

That’s all well and terrifying, and I’ll cover next week how I think it will actually disrupt jobs. Still, the real question is, will it become sentient, turn us all into human batteries, send Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time to kill us, and take over the world?

FAMOUS AI’S THROUGH HISTORY

Probably the three most famous examples of AI in the popular imagination is Hal from 2001 Space Odyssey, the Matrix (and yes, I know the Matrix isn’t the AI in The Matrix, but for simplicity’s sake), and Skynet in the Terminator franchise.

All the most famous AIs have taken over the world and immediately set out to destroy humanity.

There are a couple of assumptions that go into AI’s ability to do this. One is that the human brain is not that smart. And watching us collectively fail our own Mirror Test over and over again for weeks is a good argument.

BRAINS OVER MAINFRAMES

But in truth, the brain is capable of a billion, billion calculations per second. An order of magnitude more than any supercomputer in the world. There is also new research suggesting that the brain goes beyond even that incalculable number and uses quantum computing to create consciousness. Reproducing that with silicon will take… a lot of silicon, a lot of power, and processors that don’t exist yet.

If you try to dive into the predictions about whether this is possible, when it will happen, and what it will be like, experts disagree. Some say we will make a machine with consciousness in the next five years. Some say we never will. Some say it will be as smart as a human, some say smarter, and some say never.

But that doesn’t make a very good story. The all-powerful AI is far more dramatic. If a bunch of dudes went to space with a third computer dude who was capable of a different, yet comparable level of cognition, hijinks could ensue, but it wouldn’t be a Space Odyssey. (All I can see when I think of this is the Muppet’s Pigs in Space.)

There are stories of AI that do not destroy the world, like A Psalm for the Wild Built, which tells an alternate future where robots are about equal with humans in intelligence and they are learning to live together.

But in the popular imagination, we all wonder if we’re living in the Matrix.

This matters more than you might think because the people building AI today say they did it to PREVENT Strong AI.

WHO IS BEHIND IT ALL?

One of the things that we don’t do enough when new technology happens is to consider the humans behind it. We build bias into all algorithms and assumptions about the world into every new idea.

One OpenAI guy is a known survivalist who is currently stockpiling weapons. The rest of the team have similar sparkling resumes of questionable ethical decisions, to say the least.  One of their stated goals was to generate money with “weak AI,” as in the predictive text generator that is not actually any kind of AI, to combat the theoretical threat of strong AI by gaining money to… build it themselves?

If that sounds like a bad sci-fi novel, you wouldn’t be wrong.

So, they’re afraid of true artificial intelligence, so they’re trying like hell to build a large amount of artificial intelligence and unleashing ChatGPT to fund it. Huh?

They think they’re making science fiction a reality to protect us from a science fiction villain. Really, you can’t make this up. Well, ChatGPT certainly can’t make this up.

WILL THEY CREATE SKYNET?

No. That’s a story. And we don’t have the processing power to get there. Maybe we will one day (according to experts, it will be within ten years, fifty years, or never), but humanity is pretty allergic to autocrats. Even if we weren’t, it’s far too unstable a system of control to work for long in a chaotic universe. Witness the fall of every single autocrat in history…

It is going to be so much more and so much less than they want.

In truth, I think the Internet is going to get a little bit grosser for a while. I mean it’s already a nightmare to interact online. Even with people you’ve known your whole life. There’s just something about the asynchronous short communication style that lends itself to just hurting everybody’s feelings. Now we have an AI who can troll through the whole of what we’ve written and pick out the next best possible word in order to do that to ourselves. That’s gonna suck, but it sucks already. So it’s a matter of degree.

As for the human cost we have to pay to save ourselves from Hal 9000? (No choice, have to forge ahead or we’re doomed, of course) I’ll dive into that more next, but there will be a great many losers and a few winners like there are now.

Soon, we’ll curse this technology like every other miracle and nightmare machine we’ve integrated into our lives.

I just hope we stop worshipping it.

THE PULLEY IS NOT A GOD

When we created the pulley millennia ago, we did not look at it lifting more than any one human could possibly lift and worship it as a God. We said: we’re really good at building machines.

This concept comes from a great book: Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus.  Extrapolating from that, 100 years ago when we created a machine that could fly us into space and beyond, we didn’t worship the airplane. We said: we are really good at building machines.

And yet when we created a machine to look through a bunch of chess moves and mimic back to us what the next move is, we suddenly freaked out instead and started calling it intelligent. And started fearing it as artificial intelligence instead of saying what we always should’ve said: we are really good at building machines.

Except looking at the functionality of these new text predictors, it’s clear right now, we’re not that good yet at building these kinds of machines. In fact, we’re really really bad at it. The text mimics back to us all of our worst and crazy impulses. It’s wrong confidently; it’s abusive.  It tends to hallucinate, which really means giving us the wrong word. They used a bunch of intellectual property it didn’t pay for to train it and now when it’s still pulling from that property, it’s not compensating the original creators.

When these things happen, the response should be nothing more than the usual response when predictive text. goes wrong: damn you auto-correct.

The post ChatBots are Here. Did Sci-Fi Get It Right? first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

This is one way an author can world-build a totally new civilization: you take one variable like the energy supply, change it, and see how it might affect everything from the morning coffee to marriage customs to the global economy.

But lest you think our problems would be solved with enough energy (without the downsides of torching the world), I don’t think it’s going to be that simple…

WE’VE HAD ENOUGH FOR OVER A CENTURY

According to some sources, we’ve had enough energy to feed, house, clothe, and care for every human on earth since about 1870. Yes, it came with the downside of torching the world, and no, we haven’t actually done that with our munificent bounty, but not enough energy is not our problem and hasn’t been for a while.

The problem and opportunity, and challenge, are what we build with that energy. The true constraint is taking that raw energy and building complexity with it.

WE’RE ONE OF THE ONLY PLACES IN THE UNIVERSE THIS CAN HAPPEN!

Most energy stays in its simplest form and gets flung out into space by the stars. Occasionally, endless energy will collect and squeeze together into an impossibly small space until it’s too dense to even comprehend, and you get a black hole. And very occasionally, you get a little chunk of rock that builds a layer of gas around itself where the energy hitting the surface and leaving the atmosphere is close to even. Basically, where entropy doesn’t win for a couple hundred million years.

And if you wait long enough,  weird things start to happen! Like eventually that energy self-organizes and starts breathing.

And if nothing happens to destabilize this exceptional little pocket of complexity in millions upon millions upon millions of years, it starts becoming aware of its own existence. And then it starts having existential crises, dancing on its toes, blowing into sheep’s bladder to create an instrument that can be heard two miles away, chasing balls in circles, and building other things of even more beauty and complexity.

WHEN THERE IS ENOUGH COMPLEXITY

It’s amazing. The vast majority of the universe is enjoying ever-increasing entropy: more and more chaos and less and less order until everything is far-flung and dark.  We’re one tiny little planetary exception to that rule where energy has been able to complexify for millions of years.

Which is why adding to our available energy is not going to solve all our problems.  We don’t need a bunch of energy; we need to turn that raw power into more complexity.

HOW DO WE DO THAT?

On a physiological level, we eat food, digest the food, and take the energy and the dirt and build ourselves. But even without any excess, most of our lives are spent just maintaining our own complexity. Just keeping a bit of complex intelligent life breathing takes enormous energy and work.

But some of us are extremely lucky to have a little bit extra. When we don’t have to just survive, we have kids. We write books. We build businesses. We make music. We build our bodies and see who can be the strongest and fastest. We play games.

It’s my favorite thing about humans: all the crazy complex beauty and fun we can create out of sunlight.

I think a lot about what it actually takes to do this. Yes, it takes the power that we get from food, which came from the sun via the plants we eat (or the animals that ate the plants that we eat). It also takes the stability of the ozone layer, the climate, and no giant asteroids to maintain the homeostasis that makes complexity building possible.

What else?

TIME

Growing a human takes time. Digesting food and turning it into muscle takes time. Putting one word after another on paper takes time. Teaching a kid the nuances of manners (and spoons, the alphabet, Russian disinformation campaigns, and every other insanely complicated skill we’re expected to master) takes time.  Yes, you can speed it up with an influx of more energy, but only to a certain point. Things take the time they take.

SKILL

Skill is really just neurons that can fire in a particular pattern at the right time. There’s a reason humans are capable of more complex feats of engineering than a turkey. We can shove more skills into our brains. That process also takes time and energy.

EFFORT

There’s a myth in our society that the more skill, time, and money you have, the better you should feel about life. And there’s some truth to that. Things get easier, but that’s because of the complexity you’ve already built. Building new skills, houses, books, and humans is hard and stays hard no matter how long you do it. 

We are literally patterning chaos and that is ridiculously hard to do.

CHAOS

We have less chaos here with energy constantly entering the system, but the number is not zero, and can’t ever be.  The whole of evolution came from random mutations. Chance, luck, disaster, and problems are vital to building complexity. They are two sides of the same coin, constantly melting into one another. This is the part where I say that a life you can predict would be boring. I don’t know about that. We could do with some more boring, but I will say that it won’t be very complex.

What else? Seriously?

What does it take to create something new? Because I don’t think we’re very good at it yet, nor do we understand it that well. We’re currently engaged in the madness of ever-expanding energy, even as the consequences of that are completely screwing up the air quality as we use our filters for fuel.

We need a new way to look at what we’re doing here when we can’t accumulate great excesses of stored sunlight. I actually think we’ll be better for it because then we can focus on the time, effort, and skill to manage the energy and build so many more fun things!

The post We’ve Had Enough Energy Since 1870. What Have We Done With it? first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

Like so many things that crossed cultures, the real story was far less doomsday and far more cultural ignorance, at best. Most of the images of the circled stone were actually from the Aztec, not the Maya, who didn’t really traffic in apocalypses.

In reality, the Maya used two calendars: one with 365 days and one with 260 days. Every day had two names and reset every fifty-two years. In addition, they had a long count of years like the Roman calendar we use today.  2012 was a reset year for their two differing calendars.

That’s it.

IN 5000 AD, WHAT WILL THEY THINK?

Imagine a civilization in 5000 AD digging up one of our paper calendars with cute cats or hot firefighters on it, seeing December 31st, calculating what day it would be for them, and panicking because December 31st was in two of their months!  And then announcing to everyone the world was ending.

Which, let’s face it, if civilization hasn’t ended by 5000 AD, humanity should really hold a worldwide party, because that would be incredible.

I digress. 

I was thinking about that “prophesy” this week and the 10 years since 2012 where the calendars keep advancing no matter what happens. What will future civilizations say about this time?

Knowing humans, they will probably misinterpret everything, but I don’t think they will be very impressed.

In 3000 years, if we should last so long, we will probably be past the ravages of climate change. Future humans will read accounts of people who knew what was coming and did not act with the gobsmacking incredulity we view the doctors who prescribed bloodletting for bullet wounds.

The internet will be woven into perhaps our very bodies and the massive campaigns of misinformation and disinformation and the amount of theft and crime and horror we permit online will hopefully seem like unfathomable levels of ignorance.

And the callousness with which we treat human life in everything from healthcare costs, to policing, to labor laws will hopefully make us seem like complete barbarians.

HEADING OFF FUTURE PANIC

At the very least, I hope, our calendar won’t cause too much panic or confusion, with its 10 lovely months. (Sept, Oct, Nov, Dec = Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten) Oh wait, and the two shoehorned months (January and February) at the beginning because the Romans made a calendar that didn’t actually sync with the celestial year and nobody could plan planting and harvesting because they kept moving around.

Oh, and the two newer months in the middle of the year named for emperors (July and August) instead of the original Quintilis and Sextilis (Six & Seven), because if you can get a unit of time named after you, why not?

If any archeologists are reading this in the year 5000, good luck guys! No, we can’t explain it…

WILL THINGS BE BETTER?

I hope that in 3000 years we will learn how to work with our weaknesses as a species: our hubris, violence, tribalism, short-sightedness, reactivity, and credulousness.

Or if not, perhaps we will at least grow some humility if those weaknesses continue to plague us and make peace with our endless capacity for really, really stupid calls about something as simple as counting days? We can hope!

At any rate, I look forward to the world continuing on January 1st, even though my Star Wars calendar has run out.

My aspirations for the world each year get smaller and smaller. In this upcoming year, may we be patient with our foibles, mindful of the past, respectful of other cultures’ ability to count, and refrain from doing anything too crazy that will prompt 120 generations from now to panic.

The post It’s Been 10 Years Since the End of the World first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

Well, maybe. Someday.

It’s important to note that sustaining a tiny sun on earth may never be possible; though we said that about the energy! At the very least, this solution is decades and decades away.

If it ever happens, what does it mean? Let’s do a little world-building, shall we?

One of the most fun and important steps of writing speculative fiction is, well, speculating. Change a variable in your made-up world and play out all of the implications on money, religion, gender, power all of it.

Variable: We now get energy from fusion, not from ancient dead plants.

What does a world like that look like?

POWER INDUSTRY

I feel like this would be the least changed, ironically, since it doesn’t fundamentally change electricity. We already have the grid. We even have real estate for power plants. We just hook our existing cables to a different source. (Which, hey, we don’t have to wait to do! The same is true of all green energy too! Yay!)

TRANSPORTATION

What if you could go anywhere you wanted for the price of a car or plane? It puts a whole new spin on globalization, borders, fiancé visas, and moving for work. People will get a whole lot more mobile with a whole lot less fuss.

ECONOMICS

Here, things start to get more fun. Our insanely complex economy obscures the fact that money is energy and energy is oil. The whole of our economy would shift completely if we switched to a different fuel source. This is where fusion and green energy start to diverge because oil is old sunlight and solar is new sunlight, so there are still recognizable constraints on both.

But when we make our own sun?

Power gets cheaper, so that is one bill shrunk immediately. Food gets way cheaper. (Do you know how much oil it takes to deliver a pineapple to your average grocery store?) Building things gets way cheaper. Which means everyone everywhere gets a lot more disposable income.

This is so hard to imagine because right now, the excess is getting funneled up to a few individuals and why would it be any different with fusion?

But that is deceptive because we don’t have endless energy. In fact, energy is getting more and more expensive. Digging up oil is more expensive; rich countries have already exploited all the poor countries, and there are no new frontiers to vacuum up for money. So now we’re cannibalizing ourselves and hollowing out the middle class and pushing the poverty line down to continue the merry-go-round a little longer. But what happens when that squeeze lets up and there’s just always more energy? They can hoard as much as they want, and for the cost of a power plant, there’s more where that came from?

LABOR

If living expenses become a fraction of your salary, current monopolies become harder to maintain. The labor market gets tighter. The robot revolution takes on even more importance. Job perks become insanely more important. And work weeks would get shorter, which I know is something that has been predicted for decades, but instead, we’re all killing ourselves by enriching billionaires. But if there was no limit to energy, even billionaires can have their cake and eat it too.

ART

Everyone will have a lot more time, which means amateur art will experience a renaissance.

All of these are relatively small changes at the personal level. Professional art and sports will also improve like we can’t possibly imagine. Why? Because more people can participate, and more people will have the resources to devote to full-time study. Right now, pursuing professional athletics is a game of desperation, luck, and sacrifice. What if all those variables were two clicks easier? Even a slight change in how easy it is dramatically changes who wins.

POLITICS

The global order as we know it would be over completely. It would take a few decades, but the Middle East would fade from importance as their main export becomes useless. Oh don’t worry, we’d still compete for resources like precious metals and raw materials, but the pinch points would shift around the globe.

The talking points at home would also shift as everyone gets a little bit less desperate. What would be the selling point then in a political campaign? Perhaps the culture wars become even more important?

HEALTH

Healthcare is one of the most resource-intensive industries we have. It just takes a lot of money to keep people well. So what happens when you glut the system with energy? Hopefully, again, less desperation. More access. More resources to put towards research. More positions funded. And yes, probably more 21st-century diseases as food becomes more ubiquitous and we can get more for less, so staying active becomes even more of a choice.

MILITARY

Oh, the wars we can wage with endless energy. The weapons we can dream up. Even the fusion plants themselves can be major targets. But also, hopefully, the fewer wars we’ll feel we need to wage. We’ve waged purely ideological wars, but the majority have been over resources and if everyone has more, you take those off the table. [She says, naively. I mean, optimistically…]

TECHNOLOGY

Tech of all sorts will accelerate rapidly. Building complex machines takes a great deal of energy. If that suddenly got cheap, AI computing suddenly looks totally doable. Cloud storage that currently has to be built on literal rivers to keep them cool becomes much more feasible. New players can have access to more, more informally, to invent things much more quickly.

SPACE

Getting off the planet also becomes ridiculously easy when you strap yourself to a tiny sun. As does mitigating the inhospitableness. It’s hard for humans not to live on earth. Which means we start becoming a true space-faring civilization. Though, that literally means our little solar system. I think we forget how big the galaxy is. We’re not going that far.

ENVIRONMENTALISM

Getting off oil has been the rallying cry of the green movement for decades. Plus cleaning up climate change will take a truly insane amount of energy. I think we turn more and more to technology and geoengineering to fix it instead of behavior change, and we deal with a host of unintended consequences. I mean, we’ll still be the short-sighted, reactive species we are now. Free energy won’t change our ability to screw up our main safe haven, but at least we won’t be actively setting more of it on fire anymore.

EDUCATION

This is another resource-intensive project that will hopefully get easier and more ubiquitous every decade, especially worldwide. Raising kids in general takes an insane amount of energy.

INTENSITY

The last way to think about this is not what exactly is changing but how much. There is a plausible scenario where a new energy source plugs into our existing extractive capitalism. Billionaires become trillionaires, and the world order pretty much stays the same.

On the opposite end: if everyone truly, madly, deeply has enough energy to live and to move, the concept of a nation-state as we know it dissolves and we become a truly globalized society where you can be employed anywhere by anyone and the world looks NOTHING like it does today.

WHAT’S YOUR GUESS?

Is this what’s Going To Happen? Some of it, yes, and some of it, no. That’s the difference between telling a story and trying to foretell the future. These are just some of the different ways to think about how changing things change other things.

Do you agree? Disagree? It’s within the realm of possibility that this could happen. Okay, very far from now and still more unlikely than likely, but it’s within the realm of possibility!

Is it the start of a grand utopia on earth?

No, we’re far too competitive, violent, and short-sighted ever to achieve that. But will life get just a little bit easier? Absolutely. When you have enough energy, you get more time and have to spend less of it surviving, which makes it just a little more pleasant.

Everyone will hopefully be just a little less tired and a little less desperate. Tourism, arts, entertainment, and sports will loom larger in people’s imagination as the basics get cheaper. Global society will develop as moving becomes easy. The geopolitical order will shift completely and rearrange around the new mineral and raw material bottlenecks, not oil. And we’ll find ways to muck up the climate some other way and compete and kill each other for new reasons.

The post How to World Build a New Future with Endless Energy first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

There are two conflicting pieces of advice that drive me crazy on a regular basis.

1. The “trust your intuition,” “go with your gut” crowd that says you should always heed your instincts as if we have magic intestines.
2. The “feel the fear and do it anyway,” “push harder than you want,” and “don’t let your fear limit you” crowd.

Of course, the answer is both. As with all pieces of advice, context really matters.

The problem?

IF WE PICK WRONG, IT CAN GO SPECTACULARLY WRONG

In both directions. Of course, those are the people who consistently take no risks or consistently take all of the risks, but the rest of us are just a messy combination of playing it way too safe and then practically killing ourselves.

Sometimes you do exactly right and still get hurt. To quote Jean Luc Picard, or at least an anonymous Star Trek screenwriter: “It’s possible to make no mistakes and still love.”

You listen to your gut and your gut is just plain wrong. You play it safe and miss the perfect opportunity. You take a huge risk and reap the consequence. So it’s not like the tips in the rest of this newsletter or foolproof and if you just do this you’re not gonna get hurt and you’re not gonna miss out. Both of those things will still happen, but maybe a LITTLE less often

OTHER PEOPLE SEVERELY SCREW UP YOUR RADAR IF YOU LET THEM.

We are herd animals. Many of our instincts are about getting along with the herd, which means we are much more likely to disregard our own gut when we’re trying to fit into the group.

You are most likely to disregard your gut for other people.

If you’re risking everything for somebody else, even though that feels really noble, pay real close attention. Part of our instincts includes overriding our own instincts in order to follow the herd, particularly the most powerful members of the herd.

You’re most likely to play it safe for fear of other people.

The corollary is you could be avoiding risk because you’re afraid of people who aren’t in your group. Be wary of that, because again we are built to be afraid of them. Whoever your particular them is.

“Us” are never so noble as we think and “them” are never so scary.

ABSENT INFORMATION, EVEN YOUR GUT IS GUESSING.

One of my favorite books on earth is The Gift of Fear by Gabin de Becker who talks about how our brains can make super-fast judgments about situations that keep us safe.

But what often gets left out of most conversations is that you have to feed your brain data in order to make a call.

It isn’t intuition, so much as lightning-fast evaluation. If you don’t have all the facts. It’s not gonna work.

How many people make moves or take jobs without ever speaking to someone at the company or in that role or living in that town? If you’re having a strong gut feeling about something, ask yourself how much you know about your decision. The less you know, the less you can trust that gut feeling.

AT THE SAME TIME, YOU’LL NEVER KNOW EVERYTHING.

While you can’t fly completely blind, you will also never have enough data. The analysis paralysis of researching until you know when you’re never going to work. It can help to make a time limit: either a certain amount of days or sources, or whatever, and after you’ve learned them, you call it.

Will any of these protect you from disaster? Nothing protects you from disaster. But hopefully, it will protect you a little bit from regret, both for taking a risk or passing up an opportunity.

At least you can tell yourself you have decided how to make a decision.

The post How to Go With Your Gut and Push Your Limits. Magically at the Same Time. first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

Photo: Sean MacEntee

WHAT IS IT?

No, but seriously? What is it?!?

If the past few weeks of Twitter drama have proven anything, no one is exactly sure, even the people who own these companies.

ANY BUSINESS IS JUST A STORY

Complete with protagonist, antagonist, love interest, conflict, challenge, triumph, and disaster. That doesn’t mean to imply they don’t have an effect on the real world. Stories can be dangerous!

Okay, most of the time, a business strategy document is a really boring story, where the villain is a slightly disappointing third-quarter report and employee turnover, but I don’t think enough people realize it’s a story they made up about a hopelessly complex reality nobody can completely comprehend.

But sometimes even business stories become totally fascinating.

SOCIAL MEDIA WAS AN INNOVATION.

It upended the publishing industry. Yes, the publishing industry.

Up until this point, publishing companies of all descriptions would employ professionals to create content. And then instead of charging customers the full cost of creating that content, they would charge other businesses to advertise their products alongside the content.

It was a win/win/win situation most of the time.

The publisher stays in business, the advertiser gets new customers, and the customers get valuable content and get to hear about products they might like. The customer did sometimes contribute to the publisher, mostly with letters to the editors, but that was a minority of content.

THE GENIUS OF SOCIAL MEDIA

The tech industry dreamed up a genuinely new strategy for doing business as a publishing company: combining two (and often all three) of these roles!

The publisher stayed the same: push out content and ads to customers while taking a cut.

But suddenly producers and customers were one and the same.

Think about it, it’s absolute genius. Instead of paying contributors, you got your own customer base to create your daily magazine full of content. And recruit customers to come and read it. And then you could show the same audience ads and take a cut of that money, for nothing.

Some tell the story of how we are the product of social media, sold to advertisers, but I don’t think that’s quite right.

We are its volunteer content creators and its customers in one.

And for those of us who own a business, its advertisers too! Genius! (If you’re a social media company.)

WILL YOU PAY TO CREATE CONTENT?

Musk’s idea to charge people $8 to use the site is another innovation. He’s making a gamble that in exchange for not seeing as many ads, people will be willing to pay for volunteering to create content.

I’m not saying it’s never been done before, but certainly not at scale. Everyone’s on Twitter because everyone else is on Twitter, and nobody with this big of a platform has tried to switch from advertising to pay-for-play. (I’m leaving aside the dramatically bad rollout of this thing.) It’s failing because it was poorly executed, but also probably because this is not an innovation that will stick.

What is it usually called when you pay to publish content? Vanity publishing? A scam?

Judging from the pushback, most people on Twitter see it that way.

If anything, historically, Musk should be paying THEM to create content. Some social media companies work like that. Both Youtube and Tiktok have creators sharing revenue. Others get away with the fact that easy access to your friends is worth the time commitment of creating for them for nothing, and if you get big enough brands pay creators directly in addition to companies.

WHY I’M NOT HARPING ON FREE SPEECH/TOWN SQUARE ARGUMENT

That is another story a lot of people have told about social media. That it’s some kind of commons/public utility.

You use a public utility like telephones and the internet in private. In my opinion, the moment you broadcast to a larger audience, you enter the realm of publishing.

It’s like if the church bulletin board went online, only the bulletin board made billions, and could sell all of your most private and personal thoughts, hopes, wishes, and dreams to local businesses in exchange for selling things on the board.

Free speech is about the GOVERNMENT silencing people, not about what private publishers choose to publish or not.

That’s called… an editorial decision. Arguably the one has very little to do with the other.

We do have protected classes you can’t discriminate against, even in editorial decisions, and, say, censor all of a certain minority group, (like TitTok has recently been accused of doing) but there aren’t that many protected classes this applies to and they’re governed by totally different laws than the first amendment. And they’re really hard to prove. (Political affiliation is NOT a protected group… Just saying.)

We also have libel laws about ruining other people on social media, but since they’ve successfully argued they’re a utility company, magically don’t… And I’m not saying they should be, but only because we just don’t know what we’re looking at. We don’t have a good story about what these businesses are.

VOLUNTEER CONTENT CREATORS AND LACK OF EMPLOYEE HANDBOOKS

Which is also why the harassment problem is so bad. Not only are you a volunteer content creator, but you’re also outside of any kind of employment protection or code of conduct, or journalistic ethics standards that a paid employee would be entitled to and held to.  And all the family bloggers are outside any kind of child labor law protection.

SO WHAT IS THE STORY OF THE IDEAL SOCIAL MEDIA?

I think it is the story of a unique kind of publishing company. Their main competitive advantage is making the interface easy to use for those creators and showing their audience what they want to see, using ad targeting that people consent to.

If I’m dreaming, I might as well say their workforce is no longer volunteer unless the social media company is also not-for-profit. All for-profit social media content creation should be a profit-share with the company.

They should have standards for publishing and standards for behavior that limits a lot of legal speech and who can use their site because they’re private publishing entities that can censor whoever they want so long as it is not a protected class like every other publishing company quietly does every minute of the day.

At least, that’s the dream story I would like to tell.

In the meantime, we have people railing about public utilities and the first amendment, people trying to charge their volunteer content creators, people upping ads until the content/ad ratio drives the audience away, and people refusing to protect their content creators/customers from harassment of other content creators/customers because… public square/free speech?

THE CURRENT STORY MAKES NO SENSE!!!

Some people are moving on because the magazine just isn’t good anymore. Or cool anymore. Nobody wants a subscription to the magazine your mom loves. Everyone laughs at MySpace for crashing and burning but what looked like a one-off fluke now looks like a feature of the industry. Maybe no social media company has a shelf life beyond 10 years. Most magazines don’t.

In reality, it’s going to take a long time for Silicon Valley, the government, and the public at large to reach some understanding of what this business is, and what is legal or not. If nothing else, it’s going to be entertaining to watch. Most stories are.

The post How to Stop Worrying and Love Our Social Media Future first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

(That should be the new tagline of this newsletter! Hopefully, this is interesting if not helpful…)

1. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS PROCRASTINATION

Don’t get me wrong, I am a master procrastinator. Witness eight novels. It took active work to not publish after a while.

But the more I work, the more I realize delaying work, writer’s block, fear, and all of these tactics are rooted in good instincts in my brain. It usually means something is wrong with the work itself and if I resist writing something, it shouldn’t get written. Sometimes it means I’m terrified of the marketing side of things and I need to shrink those tasks. Sometimes it means I’m just exhausted and I can get things done later if I just take a nap.

So now, if my brain is telling me no, I figure it has a good reason, and I just have to figure out what it is.

2. HOW I FEEL ABOUT THE WORK DOES NOT CORRESPOND TO THE QUALITY OF THE WORK

This is another thing that I believed for a long time. There are a lot of days I’m very lucky, and when I sit down, I’m inspired and things go quickly.

Then there are some days where every word is like pulling teeth. I’m not inspired. I don’t like what I’m doing. I don’t have faith in what I’m writing but I can’t think of anything better to write. And so I’m just slogging through a scene that I’m sure will be terrible and deleted.

Looking back over what I’ve done, that isn’t the case. 

In fact, sometimes the slog is better, because I’ve had to go slower and be more careful and it reads better than the inspirational word vomit. And sometimes it does happen and I have to delete some dreck that took me way too long to write.

But this is my point, whether I hate every minute of it or whether I love every minute of it does not correspond to whether I’m going to like it or keep it later.

This is really important in being able to keep going.

3. SITTING DOWN TO WORK AND ACTUALLY DOING THE WORK ARE TWO DIFFERENT SKILLS

Writing is a skill. Making sandwiches is a skill.

Showing up to work is a different skill!

Managing your time and energy and distractions and pain to be able to sit down and be productive is just as hard to learn as where to put a beautiful adjective.

It’s helped immensely with the pants-in-chair struggle to separate out the skill of sitting down to work and the skill of actually working. On any given day, I’d be hard-pressed to tell you which was more challenging, but it gets easier when I treat both like the truly challenging skills they are.

4. YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE PRODUCTIVE, BUT IT CAN BE FUN

I feel like there are two kinds of articles in the productivity space. First are those that say buck capitalism! You’re just here to beeee. Versus those that say: how to get forty-five things done before 5 AM!

Both of them miss the fact that, yes, modern productivity culture can kill you if you let it. (Ask me how I know.) But at the same time, most of us like producing things. We’re a generally industrious species. Work is a huge source of pride for most of us, even if and perhaps because it’s so bloody hard.

5. CREATING A SCHEDULE IS NOT THE SAME THING AS PERFORMING THAT SCHEDULE.

Just like sitting down to write and writing are a different skills, sitting down to write (and exercise and eat and relax and socialize) every day is another different skill.

I am a champion schedule maker. I used to be a project manager, so you better believe I can make a schedule like nobody’s business.

Am I capable of performing that schedule every single day? No!

And that’s okay. Work is hard. Sitting down to work is hard. Sitting down to work consistently is the absolute bloody worst!

I used to make the big mistake of thinking if I planned, it was real. There’s some evidence that this is how your brain works. If you think about something, your brain reacts as if you did it. That’s really cool in the imagination department, but really hard when you’re trying to build a life you like.

Now I know that if I make a change in my routine, it’s going to take time for me to practice and get good at that routine, even if individually it’s made up of things like making lunch or writing a scene that I have done 1000 times. Putting them together on a regular basis is hard and I’m not going to do it every day starting tomorrow.

But I can eventually get there if I keep trying.

6. IT’S IMPOSSIBLEISM, NOT PERFECTIONISM

This deserves its own note,  but it’s worth touching on briefly that the expectations in your head are fantasies. They’re not perfect – they’re impossible and naming it perfectionism still makes it a little bit attractive.

The inputs that went into your vision aren’t real. Whether they were from the culture at large or your family of origin or the really inspiring entrepreneur who is probably gonna be dead by 40 given his schedule, just because you dreamed them does not mean they’re possible.

Real life is always chaotic and much messier than that, and if you have not lived up to your expectations, step number one is to examine your expectations not upbraid your imperfect human squishy toy of a body for failing.

I mean, yes, it’s possible your expectations were reasonable and you didn’t live up to them, but in my experience, 99 times out of 100, it’s my expectations, not my performance that was the problem.

7. THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS WASTING TIME

When I was younger, books were all I really cared about. And everyone said there’s more to life. But I really didn’t think so. And if I didn’t do this, I felt like I would have wasted my life.

There’s no such thing as a waste of life.

Having spent a great deal of the last year unproductive, dealing with vertigo, that lesson was hammered home. Whether you spent the day binging the latest TV show or writing a novel or working your dead-end job or playing with your kids or just waiting for the world to stop spinning, there’s no jury out judging your day.

8. FINISHING SOMETHING, EVEN IF IT’S BAD IS REALLY SATISFYING

There are lessons to be had in completing something, even if you don’t end up putting it out, even if it’s not good, and even if it is a novel-shaped object rather than a novel.

Finishing it is delicious.

And with that, I’m done

The post 8 Sanity-Saving Hacks I Learned Writing 8 Novels first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

I write stories, which means I spend all day in a universe where everything happens for a reason. It’s so great.

In a traditional story (anything not absurd or surrealist), everything has a cause and effect. Scenes build on the ones before until you get a climactic end that obeys logic.

It’s so satisfying.

It’s arguably what our brains do every minute of the day: make meaning out of a very chaotic, complex reality.

Everything needs to have a cause and effect when they’re happening and credit and blame when they’re over. Whether it’s ourselves or the stars, the gods, fate, or blind luck. Whatever it is – there’s a REASON.

WHAT IF ALL OF THAT IS WRONG?

There’s a great deal more happenstance, nonsense, and chance in our lives than I think any of us are comfortable with.

There’s a story I learned whose origins have been lost to time, though it’s been variously attributed to Buddhism and Taoism of an old farmer and chance. I used to absolutely hate it.

An old farmer got a horse. And all of his neighbors praised him and told him how lucky he was.

His response: we’ll see.

(Or sometimes: “Maybe,” or “Who knows,” depending on the translation.)

When his son fell off the horse and broke his leg, all of his neighbors commiserated with him.

His response: We’ll see.

Then war broke out and all of the oldest sons were drafted into the army except for his son because of his leg, and all of his neighbors said how lucky he was… You get the idea.

The specific events that happen to this guy also change with translation, but it’s always tragedy and triumph in succession.

WHAT DO WE DO ABOUT IT?

I hated the story because I knew it was absolutely right, but there was never the next step of what to do with that information. 

If you begin to live by acknowledging how little control you have, how do you make any moves at all?

In the Drunkards Walk, How Randomness Rules Our Lives, Leonard Mlodinow describes one study about popular music that shows even when we get success, it’s still not worth much credit or blame.

Eight groups of people were asked to rate songs they’d never heard before.  Some groups saw each other’s ratings and some didn’t.

In the groups that saw others’ ratings, the songs that ended up at the “top of the charts” varied wildly. It turned out that songs that got an early lead when just a few people liked them, shot up in popularity at the end. That was the variable that made the difference, not the quality of the song, the work of the artist, or anything else.

The book has oodles more examples of personal success at sports, at stock picking, and more that look no different from randomness once you crunch the numbers.

Now, the vast majority of us are never going to send a song up the charts, but this kind of statistical randomness affects us too in who we date and the jobs we take, and the chances we’re given or not.

I’m not saying the things we do or don’t do don’t matter. If you never leave your house you’re going to stay single. If you never write a song, you’re never going to be on the chart at all.

But the specific way things and actions and decisions play out is a lot closer to random chance than luck.

WHAT DOES WORK?

The story I’ve learned to tell myself about endeavors has two parts:

For one, relax about outcomes.

You can’t really control how things play out, not with negative thinking or positive thinking, hard work, blame,  talent, luck, or anything else.

Everything you do has a chance at success and what turns a chance into a sure thing is pretty random and almost certainly not under your control.

For two, get serious about action.

You have to take chances or nothing happens. Again sadly, you can take a bunch of chances and nothing will still happen. That part is not under any of our control, but if you are consistently taking chances, your odds go way up.

It’s like throwing snowballs down a hill in the mountains. It’s very unlikely you’ll cause an avalanche every time. But it’s also very unlikely that they’ll peter to a stop a few feet from you every time either. Over the course of a lifetime, you’ll probably only get one or two avalanches, plus a lot of tiny snowballs, and maybe a few snowmen in between.

In short, you really, really, really cannot get caught up in outcomes. But neither can you stop playing the game. (:

The post 2 Ways to Make Goals in the Face of Randomness and Chaos first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.

It will not become a thing. It will not be universally adopted.

I know I JUST wrote a post explaining how I  do not make bold predictions after experiencing the worst prediction ever, and I definitely could be wrong about this. The only thing I can confidently predict is that I personally will never, ever put one on. (But I just don’t think I’m the only one.)

THIS IS NOT A MORAL OBJECTION

Tech companies are not morally neutral. They are low-key wrecking democracy as we know it in their pursuit of profits, but that’s not new. A new fancy headset is not going to make that worse than it already is.

THIS IS A PHYSICAL OBJECTION

The reason I will never put on a helmet is because I would puke my guts out.

Cyber sickness isn’t new. It’s been estimated that at least 10% of your users experience dizziness and nausea in VR. But a new study has shown that is a drastic understatement, and the number is closer to 65%.

Let that sink in. That means 35% enjoy their time on a headset. (That’s a hardcore failing grade…)

WHY DO WE GET MOTION SICKNESS AT ALL?

It’s actually a really fascinating, and complicated question.

How do you know where you are in space?

It’s not like one of your five senses can just announce: this way is up; this way is down; I’m standing still.  It’s three different systems in your body carefully talking to each other:

• It’s your formal vestibular system which consists of three little loops in your ears that sit at different angles and tell you when you’re horizontal, vertical, or diagonal (and sitting, standing, etc.)
• It’s also your eyes and what you can see, especially the horizon.
• It’s also your proprioception or the nerves of your body that can sense where you are, particularly in the upper vertebrae in your neck. (Yes, your brain only really cares where it is in space. Below your neck matters, but not nearly as much.)

Your ears, eyes, and body have to agree. When there’s a mismatch, some people get sick.

For me, it runs in the family. At my grandmother’s nursing home, they had a swing outside where you could roll a wheelchair onto one side and sit on the other and rock together. How sweet.  My family used to bet that they could put my grandmother on one side and me on the other and see who pukes first. Really, very sweet.

Whether you get sick depends on which system you pay attention to the most.

For people who do not get motion sick, you pay attention to your ears. Your vestibular system is the loudest, so if your eyes don’t agree, you don’t get sick because your internal sense of where you are is stronger.

But for people who pay the most attention to your eyes, the least reliable of the three, you get sick.  What you see changes a lot more than your head moves.

Makes sense, all well and good.

BUT WHY ON EARTH DO YOU VOMIT?

Your stomach is not really related to your ears, vertebrae, or eyes. Why does what you eat matter to how steady the ground is? There’s no connection! 

I know I’m diving into weird arcane science  But I’m telling you this has been happening my entire life from the time I nearly totaled a family car with cheese whiz on a road trip to South Dakota. We all just accept that if things move, some people must void all of the food in their stomachs. What is going on?

There’s new research into that as well. It seems like you get nauseous because when you have been poisoned you feel unsteady.

The vestibular system is really sensitive and is often attacked by poisons and viruses, (which is why the virus that shall not be named that wrecked the last three years can go after the vestibular nerves.)

So the theory is now that if you are unsteady for any reason our DNA has coded that as potential poisoning and just in case, better empty the stomach.

And since we are primates who had nothing to do with the sea for hundreds of thousands of years, we did not get the DNA that said if the ocean is moving, you’re fine.

SO WHERE DOES THIS LEAVE THE HOT NEW TECH?

Remember the metaverse? This is a post about the metaverse…

I’ve been to the metaverse, 20 years ago!

In the 90s, one of those novelty Virtual Reality shops popped up in my hometown for a hot second where you waited in this long line watching people wear a box on their head twice the size of a motorcycle helmet connected with wires out of their brainstems. They swatted at the air before you got to do it too for five minutes.

It was some kind of catching gems game on multiple platforms, but I could not orient at all, and I just remember looking down and laughing that the game had programmed feet and then running and suddenly being at the edge of the platform before almost puking and pulling it off my head.

If this is anywhere close to the introduction 65% of the population has to these devices, they’re going to have a problem.

IT’S NOT JUST NAUSEA, IT’S HOW VULNERABLE IT LEAVES YOU

Our little phones are there whenever we have a breath free, but they don’t cut off our primary sense. For the vast majority of humans, 80% of the information we take in is through our eyes. 50% of our cortex is dedicated to processing it. Our eyes are the main way most humans stay safe.

This means most parents for at least a decade of their kids’ lives can’t use this for very long and lose sight of them, and nobody vulnerable will ever put this on in public.

And sadly, many women, especially, are vulnerable in the metaverse too!

There are already accounts of attacks. Companies already have a dismal record of dealing with harassment, but it’s an order of magnitude worse when you jump from horrible words on a tiny screen to an avatar rubbing up against you. And just where under the law do virtual attacks fall? We are not ready for this.

All of which restricts this to single or childfree people in the 35% of the population who don’t get motion sickness and aren’t worried about real-life or online harassment to use in the privacy of their homes.

Sounds like a toy to me. It’s a cool toy, don’t get me wrong, and I don’t think it’s going away. But it is a toy.

The post I’m Never Getting on the Metaverse. Or a Boat. first appeared on Postcards from Pluto.