Baron Ryan

"Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.” - Sylvia Plath

Have any of these ai nerds seen Jurassic Park?

The Future of Wanting (in an age of A.I.) The reason we want is not to get what we want, in the end, but to keep wanting them. Whether we knowingly admit it or not, arrival is death (and vice versa). The trouble is, the end is necessary for the beginning and all the other parts in between. The end is what makes anything special. That any good or beauty we experience in our lifetime is rented, is what makes them good and beautiful. It is a very human contradiction that we don't want good things to end, and yet we can't deeply want those things without them one day ending. The frightening part about A.l. is that it is partially an arrival. It destroys that mental illusion of meaning—the idea that we can get what we want or that we journey to reach a destination, is essential. Without it we journey aimlessly without destination and want without goal—which we can do but not deeply nor meaningfully. The future lacks necessity. A.I. is not the enemy. It is the Eve-bitten apple that amplifies the question that was always there: What are we doing here?

the meaning of muffins… It is a distinctly human practice to tell stories. Penguins don't waddle around blathering about who might get laid off from the fishing job next week. While animals have the capacity for memory, human animals have not only the capacity, but we can embellish them and even make them up. "Made up memories" it's not a bad way to describe what stories are to an infant. Story is an instinctive feature of human beings. We tell them, listen to them, and notably we buy into them. Marriage, finding one's life purpose, healing oneself through therapy, prayer, currency, muffins, these are all narratives we allow ourselves to buy into. We eat pie for dessert and pancakes for breakfast and rarely vice versa. You eat a cupcake for breakfast, now you're a degenerate. You bring muffins to a birthday party and now you're boring. Muffins and cupcakes belong in the same family and in more ways than not, they are the same thing. but the narrative we agree on allows eating what is basically a cupcake for breakfast because we've agreed to call it a muffin. This is one of many collective narratives we buy into and it is a very human one. 🧁

How to get rich.

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