Jargogled Impressions.

Ever since we learned to shape tools to curate the environment around us, we have been shaped by our tools in turn.

When we invented fire, we started preferring cooked meat. And over the years, our canines evolved as a result. So, fire changed our dental strength.

When we sharpened the stones for hunting, we grew increasingly comfortable hunting other animals. But we also started to hunt each other. In a way, the tool brought us food, but also helped us drift apart.

When we invented the wheel, we enabled ourself to travel large distances. And so we started living away from each other. The wheel started shaping where we lived, how we lived.

Over the years, as new technologies came into being, we shaped their evolution in the beginning and when they became general purpose tools, they started shaping our society, our mores, our psyche, and our mental models.

Countless books discuss how nuclear weapons shape our political landscape, or fossil fuels drive the power dynamics. Motorized transport led to the urban sprawl that America specializes in now. The payment revolution ushered in the consumer era. The internet continues to draw us increasingly into its infinite depths. And the mobile phone made communication ubiquitous and the text messages the new letter of discourse.

What does it mean when we say our tools shape us?

As these things usually go, the shaping spans decades, if not centuries. And so, this glacial pace hides them away from our penetrating eyes as they work their magic and slowly tune us to their liking. It is as if they take a life of their own, moving those pieces of flesh and blood around till the point their reach homeostasis.

Any guesses how the way language evolved and writing developed and printing press spiraled led to how we think? McLuhan says the medium is the message. I take it to mean that the technology we use to communicate is as important as the content of the message itself. Put another way, it means completely different when we chat over text or IM versus when we do so in person, even if the content of what we communicate is the same. This is largely because there is so much the tool or the medium needs to obfuscate or amplify or reduce that it the communication takes a shape of its own.

Likewise, how has the thermometer shaped us? We now take way more measurement of bodily temperature than our ancestors ever did, right? I mean they couldn’t really. With the wearables in vogue, this ability to measure takes a demonic mode of its own and bets are off on what this level of quantification of our body and vitals will do to us. It may make us fitter than ever, or it may lead to a way more anxious mind than before. It’s shaping us slowly, as we adjust to the new tool in vogue.

It’s pretty common these days to come across research that tries to understand the impact phones, social media, games, television, etc. have on us. Most of them typically are localized – what it does to a single human body, taken independently. But what gets missed here, is what it is doing glacially to the way we organize ourselves, the way we talk to each other, the way we control our emotions, the sleights we no longer care about, and the ones that we do. We can observe and reflect but we run into the observer’s paradox soon after.

We are only now starting to understand the impact motorized vehicles had on urban planning and its subsequent downstream effects such as mass employment, the idea of a downtown, etc.

What can we portend for a future where AI agents will run autonomously, carrying out tasks, executing contracts, running scripts, and taking a wide sequence of actions independent of human feedback?

How would this new tool shape our thinking and our mental model of the world? It will likely start with shifting the digital landscape into something the AI agents would be optimized to process, say, more text-based websites and applications. The texts would be AI-agent optimized much as SEOs led to the standardization of content over the internet. The physical world would likely get shaped as the final frontier of AI and is something that we cannot even project what that would be like.

Amara’s law states that we are likely underestimating the effect of AI over the long run, and that is partly because we do not understand it. The AI chatbots are the rudimentary applications of this soon to be general purpose technology. Society will re-position itself as this technology matures – from the way it communicates, to the tasks it considers important, to the skills it will deem pertinent, and to the transactions that is understood to be worthwhile. The models will need consistent replenishments as it gorges on all kinds of human knowledge and then extends it further along its own dimensions. We will move towards a panopticon model for the world and may even become data sources for these all-powerful models, consistently being monitored and evaluated and served as reward tokens to the agents. What would that be like?

I hesitate to surface The Matrix here which now seems too primitive in its depiction of humans serving as energy sources. Maybe it will end there, who knows. But it will surely start as a data source, rich in its modalities, complex in its reasonings, amorphous in its adaptability, and granular in its details. The more content we produce, the more it will feed the models, the closer AGI will be. All those YouTube/Substack/Twitter/Patreon/Maven/TikTok creators filming their eccentricities and airing their opinions and voicing their grievances and celebrating their hustle are busy feeding the models. Gulp.

So much for the doomsday scenarios. There’s plenty right that the tool will shape us towards. A world rich with surreal brush strokes and uncanny images and loopy stories and unhinged commentary may just be what is needed to break the polarity and bring human beings together against an invisible foe.