Thoughts on thinking

I think we are going to be seeing a vast partitioning in society in the next months and years.

The process of forming expressions just is the process of conceptual and rational articulation (as per Brandom). Those who misunderstand this -- believing that concepts are ready made, then encoded and decoded from permutations of tokens, or, worse, who have no room to think of reasoning or conceptualization at all -- they will be automated away.

I don't mean that their jobs will be automated: I mean that they will cede sapience and resign to becoming robotic. A robot is just a "person whose work or activities are entirely mechanical" (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=robot).

I'm afraid far too many are captive to the ideology of productionism (which is just a corollary of consumerism). Creative activity is not about content production. The aim of our creation is communication and mutual-transformation. Generation of digital artifacts may be useful for these purposes, but most uses seem to assume content production is the point, and that is a dark, sad, dead end.

I've personally noticed this as a big trend. For example, I had become more and more reliant on my GPS in the car. I've not really been the outer control loop of the vehicle. An automated system tells me what to do.

I recently got a running watch. It suggests workouts that will help me improve my speed (which honestly I don't even care about!). If you turn it on it will blare at you if you're going too fast or too slow.

When you use any social media, you're not really choosing what you're looking at. You just scroll and the site decides what you're going to look at next.

Anyhow recently I've been reducing my usage of these things, and it's made me feel much better. Even navigating the car without the GPS makes me feel much more engaged and alive.

Ultimately one of the core things that makes us human is making decisions for ourselves. When we cede this in the name of efficiency, we gain something but we also lose something.

Marshall Brain wrote an interesting short book about this called Manna.

> I've not really been the outer control loop of the vehicle. An automated system tells me what to do.

That’s not really true, is it? Who tells the GPS where you’d like to go? You, I imagine. You don’t just follow GPS instructions unless you’ve first told it where you’d like to go. And, indeed, unless you tell it, it won’t give you any instructions (though it might suggest common destinations for you to choose from).

You are still the outer control loop of the vehicle: you’re just thinking at the wrong level of abstraction, or thinking of the wrong loop as the outer loop.

It's not a loop. It's the main() function.

The loop is driven by the system and that makes a lot of difference.

> It's not a loop. It's the main() function.

No it isn't. I regularly use my car to travel to multiple destinations in a single "session".

The reason I use GPS is because the apps built on top of it often know about traffic issues along the way - even those that have recently developed - as well as normal patterns of traffic flow of which I may not be aware, or may only have a tenuous grasp of (and don't want to waste a lot of time studying).

But be in no doubt, when the machine creates a route for me it is very much doing what I tell it to do, not the other way around. I am in control at all times and will sometimes deviate from the prescribed route or choose a different destination along the way (e.g., if I've forgotten an errand I need to run that I remember and which could be conveniently achieved).

I just don't buy this argument that the car or the GPS system is the one in control, because it's simply not the case.