Mostly Empty Time

Every scientific or technological revolution tears down yet another anthropocentric conceit. This one is tearing down the conceit that our lives are significant in informational terms. That every life story is full of unique richness worth the narration.

The humbling thing about the rise of machine learning is not that it shows us how stupid we are in “intelligence” terms, but how empty our lives are, in terms of their information content.

This moment in history is like the moment when the structure of the atom was deciphered and we realized that seemingly solid matter was better understood as mostly empty space shaped by fields.

In the last decade, we’ve discovered that human lives are mostly informationally empty time, existing in a meager set of threads with the superhistorical time computers are starting to inhabit.