Tech Titans

and heart-truth

A recent essay by

V. N. Alexander

, titled “Are the Tech Bros Insane?” seeded this one. While “insane” may be too strong a word, Alexander lays out a compelling case that many don’t want to entertain due to jubilation over Trump’s victory.

I understand. I’m frankly overjoyed that RFK, Jr. was confirmed. Ditto Tulsi Gabbard. I’m also thrilled to see rotted, dead branches being pruned and light seeping into the understory; that is how to restore health to flora.

But I also don’t want to miss the forest for the trees.

I’m using tree metaphors here intentionally, because a book I’ve mentioned before — The Overstory, by Richard Powers — pushed its way into my consciousness as soon as I read Alexander’s essay.

Within the multiple intertwining narratives in this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, lies the story of one particular individual, a young boy named Neelay Mehta. Can a fictional character add insight to Alexander’s question? I say yes.

Once again, art provides a prescient truth about the future of humanity and the paths we choose to arrive at it.

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A child of Indian immigrants, Neelay Mehta grows up in the Silicon Valley where his father, Babul, works at an early computing company. Together they dive deep into coding, and it quickly becomes clear that Neelay is a prodigy. He loses himself in the primitive machine, “trains it for hours like it’s a little puppy.”

Babul shows him a picture of a temple ruin, collapsed under the weight of the braided trunks and roots of a giant fig tree, saying, “A tiny seed fell on this temple roof… You see? If Vishnu can put one of these giant figs into a seed this big… Just think what we might fit into our machine.”

Powers writes,

That temple-eating fig in his father’s photo inhabits the boy. It will keep on growing faster with each new chunk of reusable code. It will keep on spreading, searching the cracks, probing all the possible means of escape, looking for new buildings to swallow. It will grow under Neelay’s hands for the next twenty years.

But before it does, 11-year-old Neelay, in a strangely perfect moment of preparation for his destiny —and a nod to A Separate Peace — falls from a tree and breaks his back. He is paralyzed permanently from the waist down.

It is this moment that I’ll return to, later.

His new immobility only accelerates his coding prowess, which Stanford University, aka “the Farm,” recognizes by accepting the wheelchair-fused wunderkind two years early into its sandstone coterie of future titans.

Powers again:

Something is being born in the bowels of half a dozen different buildings across the Farm. Magic beanstalks erupt everywhere, overnight. It comes up in conversation with friends, in the basement computer lab where Neelay hangs out and codes.

Someone says, “We’re evolution’s third act.” …It’s like they all have the idea together. Biology was phase one, unfolding over epochs. Then culture throttled up the rate of transformation to mere centuries. Now there’s another digital generation every twenty weeks, each subroutine speeding up the next.

“A trillionfold increase. Programs a million million times deeper and richer than the best thing anybody’s yet written.” They pause for sober marveling. Neelay hangs his head over his untouched pizza, staring at the wedge as if it’s a problem in analytic geometry. “Living things,” he says, almost to himself. “Self-learning. Self-creating.”

Neelay builds games and releases them free into the public domain where they’re snapped up by hungry males, mostly, from all parts of the globe.

The more he gives away, the more he has. From his vantage, stranded in his wheelchair in a basement lab, whole new continents swing into view… On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a beached, elongated freak, unable to move without machines.

He’s satisfied by his philanthropic offerings until the day he wheels into the college’s inner quad, where a veritable terrarium of potted trees stuns him into a vision of futuristic grandeur:

There will be a game, a billion times richer than anything yet made, to be played by countless people around the world at the same time. And Neelay must bring it into being. He’ll unfold the creation in gradual, evolutionary stages, over the course of decades. The game will put its players smack in the middle of a living, breathing, seething, animist world filled with millions of different species, a world desperately in need of the players’ help. And the goal of the game will be to figure out what the new and desperate world wants from you.

He drops out of school to code full-time, living in his electric wheelchair and often forgetting to eat or sleep. When his world-building, world-altering game called Mastery finally hits the market and skyrockets in popularity, he takes on an almost mythical status. With his bony frame and long, flowing hair, Neelay looks the part of a saint or ascetic genius — even as his personal company grows into a financial leviathan.

Not content with the game’s lack of absolute verisimilitude with the richness of the natural world, he and his team of increasingly wealthy coders release successive iterations of Mastery, each one more Earth-like than the next. He creates personal AI bots like pets to sniff out and retrieve any information present on the web about minute workings of nature, then relays what he’s found to his tech team:

“Let’s build this place up in every detail, from stuff out there. Real savannas, real temperate forests, real wetlands. The Van Eyck brothers painted 75 different kinds of identifiable plant species into the Ghent Altarpiece. I want to be able to count 750 kinds of simulated plants in Mastery 7, each with its own behaviors…”

Eventually he arrives at Mastery 7, the most realistic version yet. His dying father, so ill he cannot walk, joins him virtually within the magnificent simulacrum for a hike, before the game goes live.

Astounded by the world his son has created, Babul keeps asking questions as their avatars wander the dreamscape of ocean, waterfalls, and jungle populated by “real” flora and fauna. It’s staggering in its scope and specificity.

It dawns on Babul that:

“…the fish in these seas, the birds in the air, and all that creeps on this made Earth is just a crude start for some future refuge, saved from the vanishing original.”

Neelay leads him through a maze of jungle to where the trail thins. Ahead, almost hidden, is “a ruined temple, swallowed by a single fig.” Babul is moved by this honoring of their history together, but he is unable to express his emotions: “[He] wants to ask: How do I make my eyes water? Instead, he says, Thank you, Neelay. I should go now.

Neelay responds, Yes, Dad. I’ll see you soon.

Both of them know that’s a lie. Neelay is too fragile now to board a plane, and Babul will not live long enough to see the launch of Mastery 7.

Eventually, version numbers disappear altogether, replaced by continuous upgrades. Mastery Online fills with millions of players. Revenues are at an all-time high. But Neelay realizes the game has a Midas problem: the unintended negative consequences of achieving a goal. In this case, it’s unbridled acquisition.

Every player starts as an early hominid, then progresses from gathering food and hunting animals to planting crops and cutting trees. The more time logged, the faster the progression: from building cabins and town halls to cathedrals and world wonders, until there is no more room for expansion. Competition, conquest, development, advancement, gain.

In Neelay’s words: “Everything’s dying a gold-plated death…There’s no endgame, just a stagnant pyramiding scheme. Endless, pointless prosperity.”

His epiphany — that the only way to make the game truly interesting is to raise the stakes of engagement, by introducing actual limits, finite resources, and dire consequences — is roundly dismissed by the project managers, because they know it won’t fly with their constituents. “Our players want to get away from all that shit.”

Ultimately, and at no surprise to him, Neelay is ousted from the company he birthed. The game is no longer his; it is a “god game that has escaped its god.”

Disturbed by what he sees as the Earth in crisis, he takes up the cause of her survival with the resources he has left: his fortune, waning strength, and infinite creativity. Though he’s not arrogant enough now to believe that he can create a “future refuge, saved from the vanishing original,” as his father once thought, Neelay still channels all of those resources into technology to save the world. That is where he places his faith.

We’re now approaching the end of Neelay’s story. Rather than attempt to encapsulate Powers’s vision, I offer you a few of the final passages that describe the outcome of Neelay’s efforts so you can fully appreciate their message:

And so Neelay gets out and sees the world. His children [the AI bots he designed] comb the Earth tonight with one command: Absorb everything. Eat every scrap of data you can find. Sort and compare more measurements than all of humanity in all of history has yet managed.

Soon enough, his learners will see across the planet. They’ll watch the vast boreal forests from space and read the species-teeming tropics from eye level. They’ll study rivers and measure what’s in them. They’ll collate the data of every wild creature ever tagged and map their wanderings. They’ll read every sentence in every article that every field scientist ever published. They’ll binge-watch every landscape that anyone has pointed a camera at. They’ll listen to all the sounds of the streaming Earth. They’ll do what the genes of their ancestors shaped them to do, what all their forebears have ever done themselves. They’ll speculate on what it takes to live and put those speculations to the test. Then they’ll say what life wants from people, and how it might use them.
…
ACROSS THE BIOMES, at all altitudes, the learners come alive at last. They discover why a hawthorn never rots. They learn to tell apart the hundred kinds of oak. When and why the green ash split off from the white. How many generations live inside the hollow of a yew. When red maples start to turn at each elevation, and how much sooner they’re turning every year. They will come to think like rivers and forests and mountains. They will grasp how a leaf of grass encodes the journeywork of the stars. In a few short seasons, simply by placing billions of pages of data side by side, the next new species will learn to translate between any human language and the language of green things. The translations will be rough at first, like a child’s first guess. But soon the first sentences will start to come across, pouring out words made, like all living things, from rain and air and crumbled rock and light. Hello. Finally. Yes. Here. It’s us.

Let that sink in.

Highland Springs, 2019. Photo by MPM.

Yes, that’s correct: technology, by it sheer volume of data collection and data integration, will become a “new species.” What Neelay envisioned in the basement of The Farm amongst his fellow coders will allow us to communicate with all the components of the living earth; this species will give voice to “green things.”

It will also “say what life wants from people, and how it might use them.”

Just so we’re clear: What Powers is saying here, is that technology will literally act as translator, from life to humanity, what life needs from us — not unlike priests in the Middle Ages who acted as “necessary” intermediaries between God and the illiterate, unwashed masses.

And based on the rest of The Overstory, it’s clear that Powers is laying out the possibility that Nature is orchestrating it all, including hijacking the intentions of human beings like Neelay to further all evolution through technology. It’s not a cautionary tale, it’s a optimistic one:

There’s a thing in programming called branching. And that’s what Neelay Mehta does… He’ll spend his life in the service of an immense conspiracy, launched from the Valley of Heart’s Delight, to take over the human brain and change it more than anything since writing.

While I can appreciate the mind-bending enormity of this holistic vision — that Nature would use anything, including reshaping human brains via digitization, to achieve planetary stasis — there is a head-shaking hubris embedded within that vision.

I know, I know, Powers is placing Nature above man in this scenario, but if programmers are ultimately responsible for a new species, are they not the gods in this hierarchy? Remember the statement made by that basement coder:

“We’re evolution’s third act.”

It takes overweening ego to believe that if we human beings can just collect enough empirical data, we’ll unlock the secrets of the universe. Yet that seems to be a common belief among tech titans: information is all that stands between us and greatness, us and consciousness, us and “mastery.”

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Speaking of mastery,

V. N. Alexander

quotes from Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary to list the effects of extreme left-brain dominance:

…inability to tell what another is thinking, a lack of social intelligence, difficulty in judging non-verbal features of communication, such as tone, humor, irony, and inability to detect deceit, and difficulty understanding implicit meaning, lack of empathy, a lack of imagination, an attraction to the mechanical, a tendency to treat people and body parts as inanimate objects.

Alexander states that Tech Titans such as Elon Musk, along with Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, and Alex Karp “may actually believe AI technocracy would be good, but they are unable to understand the full implications of their goals because they suffer from right hemisphere deficits.”

I would agree, and I’d also add Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg to that group.

Which brings me back to Neelay’s fall from a tree at age 11. Through no fault of his own, Neelay grew to become a self-described “beached, elongated freak, unable to move without machines,” a man who slipped gratefully into a world of his own making.

Well-meaning Tech Titans all seem to share the same egoic worldview that Neelay Mehta inhabits — a worldview fanned by an inability, through no fault of their own, to interact comfortably with the world as it is.

They are trying to create an alternate reality, a world which their deficiencies can't be felt — whether it’s Meta, Mars, or some other realm — and building it requires god-like amounts of information. It also requires us all to join them there, because without us, they return to the status of lonely little boys. Ergo, funneling us all into the Machine is the end-goal… for “our own good.”

Musk, describing GROK — his version of AI that is quickly outstripping ChatGPT and others — said:

“In order to understand the nature of the universe, you must absolutely, rigorously pursue truth or you will not understand the universe. You will be suffering from some amount of delusional error.”

Ironically, the delusional error is his. “Truth” is not synonymous with “Data,” but Musk can’t actually “grok” that. He is searching for a place where his lack of humanness cannot be seen or felt. Mars is perfect.

Here’s some real truth, from Thomas Aquinas:

“The things that we love tell us what we are.”

And “I would rather feel compassion than know the meaning of it.”

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Information and data have their place. What Musk is doing to uncover layers of graft and corruption within the federal government is astonishing, necessary, and will probably be the single most beneficial contribution to the well-being of our country we have seen in the past 50 years.

But information has to be tempered with morality. Knowledge must be accompanied by humility. Left brain must be balanced with right.

Powers writes this enigmatic passage to describe Neelay’s thoughts:

In a few years, a kid like him will be given cognitive behavioral therapy for his Asperger’s and SSRIs to smooth out his awkward human interactions. But he knows something certain, before almost anyone else: People are in for it. Once, the fate of the human race might have been in the hands of the well-adjusted, the social ones, the masters of emotion. Now all that is getting upgraded.

What is he saying? What does “upgraded” mean in this context? I can see how Neelay would believe that the fate of the human race is better off in the hands of Tech Titans, but it seems that Powers really believes that as well:

And down in cool riparian corridors smelling of silt and decaying needles, redwoods work a plan that will take a thousand years to realize—the plan that now uses him, although he thinks it’s his.

Perhaps I’m just not able to step back far enough to grasp the bigger plan, the “mind of God,” as it were. I know there’s a view of the universe that states that everything is unfolding according to God’s plan, and I can get behind that. But that must mean that human resistance to a technological takeover is also part of that unfolding, no?

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I want to leave you with the central metaphor in Neelay’s narrative: the temple, ruined by a fig tree.

When Babul, Neelay’s father, encounters this image within Mastery 7, he wants to cry but can’t within the rules of that meta-reality: “[He] wants to ask: How do I make my eyes water? Instead, he says, Thank you, Neelay. I should go now.”

Babul must leave the simulation in order to be fully human, to express his pride in his son, or his grief at the prospect of death. Emotion, truth of the heart, has no home within technology, just as life doesn’t.

The seed that falls on the temple roof is not a metaphor for infinite data storage within smaller and smaller packages, it’s a gift of hope, of life’s rebirth.

And its taking root, spreading, and swallowing all in its path is not a metaphor for computer coding’s exponential growth, it’s a demonstration that no matter what we human beings build — in the material or the digital world — the mysterious animating force of Nature will always find a way to invade and reclaim it.

My head doesn’t know this. My heart does.

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Thanks for reading. Please re-stack it, or pass it along to a friend:

What do you think about the role of technology in our future? I’m all ears.

If you’d like to buy me a tea, here’s your opportunity!

https://ko-fi.com/marypoindextermclaughlin

As always, keep your light shining bright.
xox
M