Heartware

I am writing this on the back of a talk I gave at this year’s Harvest Festival in Turkey last week. I discussed what is happening to humanity as we explore new parts of our universe that are yet unknown, using ever more sophisticated prosthetics. The James Webb telescope is a prosthetic that places our eyes some 1.5 million miles away. The Titan Krios is a microscope that lets us see down to one hundred-millionth of a centimeter. The Future Circular Collider, which is being built at CERN, is a prosthetic that will let us enter the subatomic world with even greater clarity of vision. AI is effectively a prosthetic that enables us to solve problems more quickly and efficiently. Supercomputers are prosthetics, too. We are being vastly empowered. But, what will we do with this new capability? Will we still go to war? Or can all these advances save us from that?

We have spent most of modern history toiling away in the economy, making things: hardware, software, and now shardware (which is when the two are inextricably intertwined into one product that generates cash flows from the interface between the hardware and software). We have become so focused on this physical, practical aspect of making things because it allows us to generate income. We believe that money is the key to getting ahead and achieving security, which means we have relegated our humanity to the bottom of the priority list. When do we do our hobbies, love our loved ones, daydream, or play? When do we stare at the stars or art enough to feel a sense of awe and wonder? In our spare time. Why? Because we have lionized the financialization of everything. We have forgotten the purpose of being human.

This question - what is my purpose - is a matter of urgency now that humans are being physically replaced by humanoid and non-humanoid robots alike, and are becoming augmented by robotics that reach far into space and deep into sub-space, as well as by AI (and soon AGI), supercomputing, algorithms, and various other prosthetics that extend and empower human capabilities. What is the haecceity of being human? What is the “isness”, or quiddity, of being human? This defines our purpose. As the philosopher J Krishnamurti put it in 1981, “If a machine can do everything even better than you, then, what are you?” Today, I’d say, technology, with all its power to destroy our world and to construct the world of the future, what is our why? This is the most profound question we humans struggle with – who am I, and why am I here?

Carl Jung said our purpose is to individuate. He said, individuation is the process by which a person becomes an indivisible unity or whole. It involves recognizing and merging our innermost uniqueness by integrating the subconscious (the Id) with the conscious (the Ego), as well as the personal and collective unconscious, and by understanding the archetypal and mythic forces that shape us individually. Abraham Maslow said our highest purpose is self-actualization. He placed this at the top of the hierarchy of needs for all humans. But how much time and effort is going into individuation, what with bills, deadlines, market gyrations, dopamine hit-seeking algorithms that grew out of the gaming tables of Las Vegas, bad news waterboarding, and doom scrolling? We now treat this business of becoming fully human as a hobby that is lucky to get any time and space, because we are all working so hard. Work has become the definition of purpose rather than individuating or self-actualization.

Our new technologies are making it vastly easier to get work done, thus freeing us up to not work. But, here is the problem. We don’t know how to not work. We don’t know how to live anymore. We are so busy making historic advances at record speed with hardware, software, shardware and solving problems, we have not realized that our hearts have atrophied, and our souls are left undernourished by the flood of resources we devote to “productive work” as if the business of being a human, or becoming a self-actualized human, is not “productive” or necessary but a nice-to-have luxury.

Worse still, we don’t see that the massive advances in technology actually require spiritual elevation, especially in an era when technology is so powerful that it could eliminate life on Earth altogether and allow us to create life and a world that is better than before. The more technological power we acquire, the greater the need to protect the moral preserve of our humanness. We need a “heartware” upgrade, since that is the essential part of the iOS for being human.

Yes, we humans have an iOS: an internal operating system we can call heartware. Like software, it can and must be updated. Like hardware, the heart needs to be used/deployed in real-world circumstances. Heartware serves the needs of the spirit and the soul. What is the difference between a human spirit and a human soul? The fact that we have to ask this question already tells us a lot about our IOS. I like the way Teilhard de Chardin put it. We are not humans having a spiritual experience. We are spirits having a human experience. C.S. Lewis said, “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul”. Perhaps we can say that the soul pertains to identity across the span of time? Perhaps we can say that spirit pertains to the divine and transcendence through time? Even these deep philosophical matters seem to be a drag on our otherwise valuable time. We’d rather stay in the groove we are in. This brought Rumi, the philosopher poet, to say, “One of the marvels of the world is the sight of a soul sitting in prison with the key in its hand!” We don’t have time to read poetry, let alone write it or absorb the meaning of it.

Instead, we are always trying to optimize everything for efficiency, because time is money. We obsess about optimizing everything in our bodies (sleep, vitamins, exercise, nutrition) and our time (track every 15 minutes, prioritize, schedule, delegate, stop procrastinating, and eliminate “time wasters”). We aim to optimize our love lives by eliminating “time wasters,” allocating time for dating and love in our spare time, approaching dating like a game theorist, utilizing dating apps, and balancing the costs and benefits of love. We financialize everything. Even love. Even war.

In our wars, we don’t talk about individual humans. Instead, we speak about troops, generals, and civilians, assuming that the loss of any one person is less important than the outcome of war as an enterprise. There is no room for the heart’s needs. It may even be that technology itself demands that we prioritize its needs over our own. Just like the bacteria in your biome make you reach for sweets, so the technology in your grasp makes you reach for ever more data, ever more capability, ever more tech. The philosopher, Friedrich Kittler, argued that we create the tech that facilitates the advent of war because nothing advances tech like war (See Operation Valhalla: Writings on War, Weapons and Media). In this sense, war, he said, is the "mother of all technologies. Here we are drifting into war. We must take notice as Germany shifts its production lines from autos to armaments and embraces ”military Keynesianism”. The German Chancellor has lifted range restrictions on weapons being given to Ukraine.

But, before the war in Ukraine expands, maybe we could upgrade our heartware. Instead of looking backward at past wrongs, we could look forward and begin imagining what a good outcome looks like. It is not enough to say somebody must win and somebody must lose, especially since the power of modern weapons systems is so great that there will be no winners. This is why we keep hearing President Trump say, “We have weaponry that nobody even knows”. But to imagine a new future, we must go to war with our assumptions, our paradigms, and our beliefs. Why, because new innovations in science and tech tend to lead to discoveries that break the rules we had thought held true. The breaking of old frameworks, working theories, and paradigms and the establishment of new frameworks, working theories, and paradigms is a messy, demanding, brain-bending business.

So, what is the fundamental problem?

The economy requires us to fit into it, like mechanistic and interchangeable cogs in a machine. It should be the other way around. The economy should serve our individuation. Work can be a way of discovering our gifts and uncovering who we are. This reframing alters the way we perceive jobs. If we are just a cog in the machine