Part II: The Solution
Pirahas laugh about everything. They laugh at their own misfortune: when someone’s hut blows over in a rainstorm, the occupants laugh more loudly than anyone. They laugh when they catch a lot of fish. They laugh when they catch no fish. … . This pervasive happiness is hard to explain, though I believe that the Pirahas are so confident and secure in their ability to handle anything that their environment throws at them that they can enjoy whatever comes their way. This is not at all because their life is easy but because they are good at what they do. Linguist Daniel Everett, from the book “Don’t sleep, there are snakes”. Everett spent 30 years learning the language and living with the Piraha people of the Amazon.
In general, I believe that having more of certain things—namely health, time, money, and energy—is always preferable. But we can lose a lot when we optimize for these four goals. Beyond paying in one to obtain another, there are compelling arguments that fixating on optimization can make people less connected to reality and unduly obsessed with control. Computer programmer, Lucy Liu, who wrote an algorithm to optimise her life with underwhelming results.
The Artificial Intelligence revolution is underway. Many people I’ve spoken to over the last 3 months have been using ChatGPT for their work or study purposes. Many of our jobs will be better done by machines. Many current jobs will become obsolete and with them will go certain lifestyles.
Even as we hurtle toward an AI future, we tend to valorise those most AI-like parts of ourselves. The logical, consistent, gratification-delaying parts. Many, like Lucy Liu (not the actor) quoted above, are always on the look out for life-hacks to optimise their lives.
So, while humans become more machine-like, machines surge past us in their mechanical abilities. What good are we humans when we shape up so poorly to our robot-brethren?
What is left for us?
The Piraha tribe of the Amazon Rainforest couldn’t approach life more differently to us Western Moderns. The Piraha language has no words for the distant future or past. It is difficult to express things that have never been seen by tribe members in Piraha. The Pirahas truly live in the here and now.
Now, I don’t want to romanticise the Pirahas too much. Because they never plan for the future, they are sometimes hungry. They have a more casual attitude to death, meaning that adults and kids often die from preventable problems. They don’t perceive a great lack in their lifestyle, so they are rarely motivated to pick up cultural and technological advances that could give them more health and money.
But the Piraha’s lifestyle would be hard for AI to replicate. Each member is an all-rounder. Extremely competent in jungle survival. Living together, talking and socialising, far more than they work.
And, the Piranha seem genuinely happy and authentic.
But the life of the Piraha is the Garden of Eden. The rest of us have eaten from the tree of knowledge and there’s no going back. How can we live more human lives in this world ruled by machines?
There are ways that I believe we, the last pre-AI generation, can embrace our human side whilst living well; letting our ego relinquish control. I believe there are three ways we can practice relaxation of the ego: Intuition, Indulgence and Ignorance.
There are parts of your mind that are inaccessible to you. Allowing intuition to guide you means sometimes trusting those parts that you don’t quite understand or can’t explain. Not writing things off as random chance. Choose to find meaning in coincidences. Follow paths that feel right, even if you can’t rationalise why you follow them.
Indulgence is seen as the enemy of optimisation. Habit-formation experts and podcasters will tell you be consistent in your good habits. But the Pirahas are lean and happy, and they always eat to excess when they have good food. But they also have prolonged periods without any food. And even more periods when they hunt or gather only what they need for the moment. They are balanced in their extremes.
In my last article I cited research that shows that couples who indulge together are happier. I believe that shared indulgence is vital for human bonding.
Ignorance perhaps sounds the most challenging. Knowledge is power, why would anyone embrace ignorance?
Embracing ignorance isn’t being wilfully ignorant, however. It’s embracing what we don’t know. It’s embracing the fact that we don’t know many things that we think we know. Its staying with uncomfortable things that we don’t yet know, rather than staying in our comfortable world of knowledge.
At the heart of these three practices is letting go of control. The machine will always be better at expressing the ego’s desire. Leave what’s robotic to the robots.
And save what is human for the humans.
