Tell Homer
Telomeres are a biological countdown artifact. They are those parts of the DNA that count how many times a cell can divide before dying. This requires clockwork precision because if the number is too low, the body is not going to sustain toxic shocks, and if it is too high, there is a greater threat of developing cancer, which is nothing less than cells starting to multiply without ever dying. Harmony is the name of the game. Life is not just about homeostasis. It is rather about equilibrium. This remark holds across scales, from a single cell to populations and even civilizations.
The digital revolution is breaking the harmony that civilization had reached. The question is how it will be restored and what kind of harmonious civilization could emerge after the dust has settled.
Homeostasis is about feedback, but it is limited to a single dimension. If your body is heating too much, you sweat, and if it is cooling, it will shiver and burn extra calories. By essence, homeostasis is monodimensional and adversarial. Harmony, on the other hand, attempts to balance everything as a unique aim. It is about the integration of all dimensions. Cooperation is the name of the game.
Modern digital life offers two symmetrical phenomenons that are epitomes of a lack of harmony. One is perpetrated by humans, the other by machines.
Focus point
I have burned more leaves and insects than I can remember during my youth using a magnifying glass. The sun, when focused, can become an unstoppable destructive force. While being sought after by vacationers, the sun may quickly become their worst enemy simply by being focused too much. Digital technologies are the intellectual equivalent of magnifying glasses. With a single tool, one can access all the knowledge of the world. AI even promises you access to the whole of human wisdom too.
Ancient Greek mythology warned us not to fly too close to the sun. Apparently, we have forgotten and we are going to be taught, again, by falling down like Icarus did. The Bible is also a succession of cities falling down because of hubris or a derivative of it. Repetition is the name of this game. Humans are having a hard time remaining focused.
The rabbit hole knows no end, though, with a smartphone in hand. You can see people falling into the hole on public transportation. Trapped by the algorithm or an online flame war, the global look of the crowd has been narrowed down to a set of singular points. Just ask for directions to an absorbed commuter and you can watch him coming back to Earth while her eyes move from the screen to your face.
A piece of scrap
An interesting inversion is at play here. If humans are having a narrowed attention span, it goes the other way around for LLMs. It is in the name: “Large” is there for a reason. Basically, AI companies are scraping the whole internet to suck the wisdom out of the crowd and distill it into a neat model. But what do you do next when you have already scraped the whole internet? How do you engineer your next jump on the intelligence ladder? It is not clear at the time of writing. A possibility is to suck the texts out of social media, but Reddit-based models won’t be fed by material that has been vetted either through time or an editorial board with standards.
Maybe more focused LLMs, or specialized AI, whatever the technology, will be useful. The price of harmony would go against the quest for AGI though. Not really in the zeitgeist.
Achilles and Hector
Achilles is the ultimate embodiment of raw arete. He is the greatest warrior alive, completely unstoppable on the battlefield. Hector’s arete is tied to duty, family, and civic responsibility. Homer splits the concept of virtue between his two main character. A harmonious move that has kept his text alive for millennia. Instead of killing the action with a clean-cut role distribution, the story remains alive by this echoing roles.
In the story, there is also this scene: Priam sneaks into the enemy camp to beg Achilles for the body of his dead son. Achilles breaks down in tears, recognizing their shared grief as mortals bound to suffer. He relents, feeds Priam, and gives him the body back. While arete makes you a legend, it is empathy and shared humanity that keep you from becoming a monster.