Computing and the Fourth Narcissistic Injury
I am a nurse by trade but I'm learning more about computers because I want to try to understand the world I live in. Computers completely dominate my world. For most of the day I'm working on them both at home and at work and it occurred to me that I have no idea how they work or where they came from. I've learned that, underneath it all, computers are just a series of switches, albeit billions of them. These switches are called transistors and they basically turn on and off in a series of logical operations that flip billions of times per second. These complex sequences ultimately bring us the GUI that we see. But really, underneath it all, there are only two states - on and off.
There is one biological structure that I can think of that acts in a similar way in our nervous system. The voltage-gated sodium and potassium channels in our neuronal membranes basically use the movement of ions to trigger an electrical signal that turns our neurons on and off. If I go any deeper than this the comparison or analogy starts to fall apart but loosely there is a similarity there. But on the other hand, there is some evidence that cells make choices about the way they will behave, though the decision space is limited and very narrow. So that's different than a machine I guess, although that distinction is becoming a lot more complicated the more AI advances. I guess I'm trying to understand the difference between the human and the machine. What makes us human? What differentiates us from the machines? This is an important question for me to try to answer as the age of AI starts to pick up steam.
Freud talked about three narcissistic injuries that humanity has suffered. These include the Copernican revolution when we learned we are not at the center of the universe, Darwin's theory which tells us we are simply another form of evolved animal and not as special as we thought, and Freud's own theory that basically told us that, underneath all our claims of rationality, we are not fully in control of ourselves. I think AI is the fourth narcissistic injury and humanity is currently reeling from it. This will play out over the next decades and centuries. I mean for god's sake, there are still people in the world who literally believe that the earth is flat. Even the first injury is too much for some people.
It is hard being a human caught up in the flow of history. It's very disorienting to live in interesting times. Writing this blog with no commercial goal in mind is such a relaxing way to work through some of these thoughts and find some way to cope with the revolution that has shaken the ground beneath my feet.