Stop Pretending You Want Simple

On being hypocrites about the automation we're building.

TL;DR in five points:

• The simple past we pine for was terrible - we’ve just forgotten how terrible while romanticizing simplicity that would kill us

• We can’t psychologically handle the complexity we’ve built, so we invent simple villains and conspiracy theories

• Most people claiming they want “less technology” are typing it on a device they won’t give up

• You’re a hypocrite about automation too - stop pretending otherwise. It’s ok. It’s called being human.

• We’re all children of the magenta, but we’re also the ones drawing the line

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The premise underlying both my consultancy, Transition Level, and this Substack is about navigating our path toward greater automation with intention and even wisdom. Moving to a more automated future better, more mindfully, with greater control over the trajectory.

One might reasonably ask: why accept this premise at all? Perhaps our future should be about less automation, not more. Return to basics. Rediscover the tangible, the manual, the comprehensible.

I understand this impulse deeply - I regularly venture into the wilderness myself, though somewhat tethered to civilization with an EPIRB. To do so more broadly as a society has a kind of visceral pull to it.

Yet to pursue this as a civilization would be folly of the highest order, for this yearning contains a dangerous amnesia.

We’ve become nostalgic for a past that would horrify us if we actually lived it.

The Past Was Basically Terrible

Eight billion souls cannot return to subsistence farming, or hunting & gathering - the mathematics alone make it impossible. But more fundamentally, we’ve forgotten what that “simpler” life actually entailed.

Vinay Gupta, in The Future of Stuff, reminded us:

“The past was basically terrible. It had its points, but it was basically terrible.”

The specifics deserve remembering: Feudal lords with unchecked power. Child labor as global routine. Casual violence as conflict resolution.

Gupta continues:

“The ages before us were lawless, ignorant, dangerous and violent, often all at the same time. During those times, just to get through the day meant doing things very few of us would be physically ready, psychologically able or morally willing to do today.”

Yet that terrible past had one seductive quality: it was simple.

Or at least simpler. And simpler has a nice ring to it when you’ve just barely dodged the fourth phishing attempt of the week, read 17 pages of school newsletters, juggled three project management platforms that don’t talk to each other, only to get home in the evening to find that your car won’t start until you agree to new terms of service, your lightbulbs are offline, and somehow your toothbrush is disappointed in your brushing analytics this month.

Or at least the past came with an illusion of simplicity: you knew your place, your fate, your world. The blacksmith’s son became a blacksmith. The lord remained the lord. God’s will explained the inexplicable. Limited information meant limited anxiety; you couldn’t doom-scroll through distant disasters or compare your life to curated highlights from across the world.

The Better, but Incomprehensible Present

By nearly all reasonable metrics, the world has gotten steadily better for humans for hundreds of years (yes, for humans - I am not talking about the planet as a whole, which we will not discuss here). Steven Pinker has reminded us of that in Enlightenment Now; Hans Rosling did the same in Factfulness, both offering compelling facts and data.

While I certainly don’t agree with Pinker on everything, he did make a salient observation:

“As we care about more of humanity, we’re apt to mistake the harms around us for signs of how low the world has sunk rather than how high our standards have risen.”

Slavery, once commonplace, is now universally condemned; casual violence that would have been wholly unremarkable in 1800 would horrify us today.

A certain nation exists because Britain considered it perfectly reasonable to ship 162,000 people halfway across the planet for crimes as trivial as stealing bread or a handkerchief - a geographic death sentence where the journey alone killed one in ten.

Today, there’s outrage if someone tries to pry away a mobile phone from a minor for a few hours a day.

Nicholas Carr, in Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, notes that humans simply aren’t psychologically equipped for global awareness. We evolved for tribes, not planetary town squares where every village idiot has a megaphone. (And thanks to how incentives of the networks we built work, the idiots also get handed the largest megaphones.)

The communication tools we built to connect everyone have instead revealed that mass connection might be fundamentally incompatible with human psychology.

The world is incomprehensibly complex, always was, but now each layer announces itself. AI hasn’t yet slipped quietly into the infrastructure like plumbing or electricity. It’s in-your-face, chatting with you, casually outperforming you here while making you question the usefulness of any of it there, making its complexity personal. We respond like threatened primates: mocking what we can’t understand, inventing diminishing metaphors (”stochastic parrot”, anyone?), celebrating every failure like proof we’re still special, laughing at people who think otherwise.

In doing so, we’ve invented yet another tribal division. Great, didn’t have enough of those.

What does it say about our insecurities and self-image that we assume anything smarter than us would inevitably spell doom? Perhaps we’re having an uncharacteristic moment of clarity: if AI is made in our image, as we supposedly are in God’s, what exactly are we afraid it will inherit?

The Maladaptive Response

Faced with incomprehensible complexity, we don’t develop tolerance of said complexity. Wouldn’t that be nice. Instead, we yearn for simplicity. We want to understand the world, but we can’t, nor can we seem to accept that we can’t.

That means easy explanations are tempting. Very tempting. Once the domain of religions, we have more choice on this now, too - like conspiracy theories, something I spent too long researching during the COVID years.

QAnon, for example, isn’t fundamentally different from medieval beliefs about divine providence - both offer totalizing explanations that make random events feel purposeful. The recent White House article suggesting links between acetaminophen and autism, despite overwhelming scientific opinion to the contrary, represents the same impulse: complex phenomena explained away with simple villains. Who needs science when it’s all so obviously a cover-up?

Unfortunately, it’s a predictable response to being overwhelmed by complexity.

When you can’t understand why things happen, inventing a comprehensible, if wrong, explanation feels better than acknowledging the limits of our comprehension. Saying “I don’t know” has always been so hard for us; probably right up there with “I’m sorry.” Both are admissions that we think, erroneously, make us smaller than we desperately need to be.

And now?

Now, we’re well on the way of shifting from “God’s will” to “the AI knows best” - same abdication, different deity.

Created with Midjourney v7, prompt “modern figure in business attire kneeling in front of a glowing algorithmic shrine made of servers and circuit boards, ironic religious overtones, clean digital painting with muted palette”

The Dangerous Comfort of Simple Stories

The weird nostalgia for that mythical time when things made sense is now actively shaping policy, culture, and technology development. Whether it’s Thiel lamenting how progress has stopped and warning about the Antichrist, or tech execs building doomsday bunkers in New Zealand while preaching accelerationism, you get the distinct sense that the writers of our timeline were fired and replaced with interns, who were then fired and replaced with a cheap LLM, because you really cannot make this stuff up.

When complexity becomes unbearable, we don’t just seek simple explanations; we try to create simple realities - the world doesn’t make sense, fine, so we’ll make our world make sense. We build echo chambers that confirm our worldview, and get nice and comfy with our tribe - often against some other tribe. We elect leaders who promise to return us to an imaginary past, or destroy the establishment, except once they become it, they kind of forget that part.

Interestingly, the past wasn’t actually simpler in terms of explanation - there were no explanations; we were more comfortable with not knowing.

Religion allowed people to accept mystery as part of life. “God works in mysterious ways” was an acknowledgment of incomprehension. With secularization, we’ve lost that comfort with not knowing, replacing it with the anxious need to have an answer, any answer, immediately available.

We don’t have new rituals of not knowing. Without frameworks, and dare I say rituals, for handling uncertainty, we fall for people peddling easy answers.

Not every question needs an immediate answer.

Not every phenomenon has a simple cause.

Not every problem has a villain.

We need to:

• Get comfortable with partial understanding, and curious to learn what we can

• Trust expertise and scientific process (while remaining appropriately skeptical)

• Recognize when we’re choosing comforting fiction over uncomfortable reality

• Accept that some things exceed any single human’s comprehension

You Actually Want the Complexity

The technologies catalyzing the transformation of our world, for better and worse, and everything in between, aren’t going away - because we don’t want them to go away.

As a thought experiment, consider which of these you would like to surrender:

• The Internet and access to the infinite library of human knowledge, and all your weird niche little communities

• GPS navigation that means you’ll never be truly lost, anywhere on Earth

• Electricity and artificial lighting so you can ‘be productive’ after dusk

• Aircraft that allow you to experience other cultures and meet your friends & family

• Computing power that would have been classified as a supercomputer 30 years ago, now in your pocket

• Antibiotics that turned death sentences into minor inconveniences

• Anesthesia that makes surgery possible and often beneficial rather than torture

• Refrigeration that freed our food sources from geography and season and allows us to eat better than kings did 200 years ago

• Digital payments that work instantly across continents

• Weather prediction that has turned lethal storms into survivable events

• Contraception so you can enjoy sex without it resulting in a plethora of children

• Vaccines that made childhood survival probable instead of a lucky break

• Medical devices - from reading glasses to insulin pumps to pacemakers - that have turned disabilities into inconveniences and past death sentences into manageable conditions for many of us

If you picked one or more - congratulations, you are opting to live in a world that is so complex you will never fully comprehend it.

The truth is, we all want to be children of the magenta.

It’s ok. It’s in our nature - we’ve always sought tools to ease our lives, not make things more difficult.

The problem isn’t the desire; that’s a feature, not a bug. The problem is that in some cases, that desire is being harnessed for things that end up harming us, and that in other domains, many systems aren’t ready for the trust we’re eager to give them, or the agency we’re willing to grant them.

And yes, we’re all hypocrites about it.

We rail against Big Tech from our iPhones. Lament the death of human connection via tweets and Insta posts. Condemn automation while using self-checkout because there’s a 2min queue to the cashiers. Pay with Apple Pay while bemoaning surveillance capitalism.

We mourn local businesses dying while at our front door, Amazon boxes pile up. Decry algorithmic manipulation between streaming binges. Share articles about phone addiction without ever looking up from the screen. Complain about our data being harvested on apps we won’t delete.

We lecture about carbon footprints before boarding flights to conferences about sustainability. Worry our kids are too online while using screens as babysitters. Romanticize handwritten letters we’ll never send.

Oh, YOU’RE not a hypocrite? You’ve never done any of this, and it’s just all the rest of us that are the problem?

Congratulations.

Now come down off that high horse and help the rest of us take responsibility for the world we’re actually building, not opine about something we pretend we want.

We’re all children of the magenta - but we’re also the ones drawing the line.

Created with Midjourney v7, with prompt “Woman walking along beach at low tide, wet sand reflecting pink sunset, behind her the tide is washing in over intricate circuit board patterns naturally formed in the sand like nature’s own technology, she’s walking toward the horizon creating her own simple path, aerial view“