What we may well believe has the power to cut and shape and hollow out the dark form of the world surely if wind can, if rain can. But which cannot be held never be held and is no flower
– Cormac McCarthy
Know the strength of man,
But keep a woman’s care
– Tao Te Ching
Joe Rogan was talking with Elon Musk a few years ago. I barely knew who he was, didn’t understand that electric cars were feasible and selling well. I couldn’t engage when they started talking about rockets, as commercial enterprise not high level science. I’m not interested in cars, find space discovery fascinating, but who is Elon Musk?
There’s a biography about him which presumably explains his interests. I’ve heard a few things, for example his South African origin and how it connects to free speech. It was denied when he was young so he champions it now.
His first big success was PayPal, giving him the capital for cars and rockets. That put him in the category of Martha Lane Fox and Brent Hoberman. Entrepreneurs with an idea, using the special capability of the internet. Before it existed, there were only random last minute flights at travel agents. Have you thought about Barbados? Not really, too expensive. I’ve got a flight here for eighty pounds if you leave tomorrow. Now you see last minute flights increase in value because there’s a market for them.
If you touch politics even slightly, you encounter the fights of others. Musk isn’t particularly political. Like me he cheers on no one, with ideas which don’t fit any box. It’s like opinion about a novel. Read Ian McEwan’s Saturday but not Nutshell is nothing to fight about. Nutshell repeats recognisable McEwan tropes but not in an enjoyable form. Discuss.
Musk was attacked in the media when he bought Twitter which involved two concerns. Redundancies, but Mark Zuckerberg did the same thing at the same time (within a few weeks) keeping companies afloat after the pandemic. Argue the ethics of doing so, certainly, but only Musk was demonised.
The other concern was his investigation into bias, censorship, and external interference. Twitter was a political tool for one side not another. You don’t have to be the other to recognise the problem. It shouldn’t be a promotion machine for either side.
If you tailor your Twitter, there’s no difference now compared to a year ago. Stray beyond nature, books, walks and photographs (in my case) and meander into politics, it’s a foul experience but always was. As WB Yeats said: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
Musk talks with influential people which recently occurred with Rishi Sunak. He is the AI expert using it for cars, rockets, and brain implants. We’re at the stage where AI takes a developmental leap into unknown territory. Programming a computer to steer a rocket to Mars with the physics that involves is one thing. Programming a computer to make autonomous decisions about nature, humanity, any conceivable subject, is another matter.
What I found interesting in his talk with Sunak was his remark about work and meaning. We will eventually have a society, he said, where no one needs to work. Trains, cars, tractors, medicine, schools, libraries, shops, will be run by computers and robots. We will have to find meaning elsewhere. I’ve read two or three Iain Banks thrillers, one of them on a Snowdonia hillside beside a tent. I couldn’t stop, it was so exciting, at the beginning of a hiking day. I’ve not read his sci-fi which, Musk advises, is illuminating for the topic. Where science takes us, how it might change society.
It’s easy to imagine possibility but it remains fiction until the economics are resolved. If a robot costs six million, it will be some time before a team of five is replaced. I’m not a science geek but it seems to me the cost of energy is the ultimate concern. Advances are being made with nuclear fusion and it could power a rocket to Mars and beyond. Musk is described as visionary but what he does, easy to understand, is project technology into a more advanced future.
One of the important AI factors, Musk says, is separation not integration with the internet. If a language model functions with updates, and is critical for society, that becomes impossible to control and you can’t switch it off. We have an unstoppable Frankenstein when civilisation, Musk says, is “fragile.”
Where then do we find meaning if we don’t work – although his speculation is hundreds of years away. The situation is one of evolutionary advance up the Abraham Maslow pyramid which for me involves two factors. The first is philosophy by which I mean Vedanta, the I Ching, Taoism, and similar. Not the dry academia of Europe but first principle wisdom, although there’s some of it in Heidegger and Nietzsche.
The second factor is habitat and care. Blade Runner is a great film but shows a dark city life devoid of trees and flowers. The 1984 film is the grey same, except for one rural moment. “Look, it’s a tree” Julia says to companion Winston Smith. It looks like the South Downs where I have walked and photographed, but in fact is Roundway Down in Wiltshire. They escape totalitarian society into nature, which I suspect is a growing feeling. Certainly I feel it. The more people say you must think like this, the more I think elsewhere.
There is concern when technology and science shape a future which controls not respects nature. Genetically modified food would be disastrous. Life isn’t explained with material parts and interfering with the pieces would disrupt millions of years of development according to another intelligence. I Ching hexagram 23 is called Po or Splitting Apart and describes the situation. The lowest line, unbalanced, means this: “The leg of the bed is split / Those who persevere are destroyed / Misfortune.”
We can see a person or plant materially when life has gone. So what’s missing, when the chemistry is apparent but not functional? This is also the great distinction between a computer and a human being. Not only is the chemistry lesser – mere silicon, metal, plastic – so too, ultimately, is the intelligence. We do considerably more than calculate.
Science has not been kind to nature and this heart breaking vision of Rachel Carson in Silent Spring sits beside technology like an ancient first principle warning:
There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example—where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was now no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh.
Science actively conquers, in which I include the obscenity of hunting for fun. Enjoying nature, we watch and listen passively. These are different kinds of activity. Erich Fromm differentiated between the mode of having, and the mode of being, in his book To Have or to Be. Society is unbalanced, he said, and that was in 1976:
We rarely see any evidence of the being mode of existence and most people see the having mode as the most natural mode of existence, even the only acceptable way of life. All of which makes it especially difficult for people to comprehend the nature of the being mode, and even to understand that having is only one possible orientation. Nevertheless, these two concepts are rooted in human experience
Musk’s distinction between activity and meaning is more profound than he intended. In Taoist philosophy the first is yang and the second yin. This is not referring to gender and society, but a meditation premise whereby doing and controlling is the problem.
Ultimately, yin becomes the opposite yang depicted as a solid I Ching line. That means the unbroken sky, not the differentiated earth, which is a divided I Ching line. Meanwhile, you can’t make your mind stop working. Allow it, like quietly watching nature, and it settles.
I write like this is a magazine column. With research, references, and a lot of time. If you like it, perhaps you would support me.