Social media and smartphones are probably the worst tech to happen to society over the last two decades. Humans just aren’t cognitively capable of handling them and at a large scale, society is not. I am not sure, though, how permanent that is. How well will we adapt? There will always be the shape of the new that is unpredictable by people molded by the antiquated and obsolete — as we can easily see by the Boomers and their increasingly hilarious but harmful irrelevance and cluelessness.

I mentioned earlier that Aurora (among a few others) has obviously been thinking about some of the same things that I have. I wasn’t exaggerating. There’s a reason I think she called her album A Different Kind of Human. To face what’s happening and what’s going to occur with climate change and further technological advance, we will need and will become regardless different sorts of human beings. Our old minds are increasingly no longer functional in this new era. The error conditions are too unbounded and they are not easily recoverable with our old ways of thinking and being in the world.

To people who claim that human nature is invariant, etc., parts of it certainly are. However, humans are also extremely transformable and to argue that a 10th century Polynesian and a 19th century British industrialist are the same is absurd. Thus, obviously we can have very different cultural frames that are both completely compatible with some unknown but extant human nature.

Some small amount of these new minds are being installed now, mostly in the young. It’s an inevitable process but it’s not guaranteed. If not enough occur in the world, we’re probably done long term. It’s a nearly-invisible transmutation that is vital to our survival but most will have no clue it is occurring, or must occur.