How to escape being bio hacked in the world of AI
The biggest risk of unexplored primal programming of our brains, we risk being bio hacked with AI targeted ads and media.
Capitalism has made it possible for people to become more uniformly educated with a standardized set of items that perform the automatic tracking of our more intimate habits. The hardware infrastructure is already set in place. Now only the service part needs to be enabled. And the mentality changing allows a very prolific environment for growth for solutions that tap into our most personal and sensitive data.
I remember reading the 9 volumes of Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, “History of private life” when I was in high school and constantly asking my dad what was the sample size that this author used to document his theories about how people lived back in those days. There are still unclear sources of data for these books but one thing remains solid: we’ve always been curious about the private life of others.
We see this in the trend of Instagram and influencers raising and uncovering their life stories on social platforms, the role of storytelling in the context becoming of fundamental value for how we orientate in the world. A dutch philosophy blogger I follow documented the role of stories in an article here.
The quantified self trend is also on the rise and people buy into more devices that help them stay on track with their goals in life. There are bigger incentives to maintain an autonomous lifestyle when technology provides you with the means to take ownership of your life and build agency over complex decisions in an informed way. But what’s most important from all these ways to measure and allow technology to take over some of the conscious processes we had to do before in order to keep a good life balance is that we don’t become lazy about it and lean into the facilitation while forgetting to be real ourselves.
Being fully human means knowing that you have to constantly manage your inner energies and work with them to balance each other.
In yoga, the 3 gunas describe the quality of the energies we have at all times in our bodies. These three gunas are:
- Tamas (darkness & chaos)
- Rajas (activity & passion)
- Sattva (beingness & harmony)
The patterns of the interplay of the gunas can define the essential qualities of someone or something, and these patterns can highly influence the path and progress of life.
For yogis, awareness of the gunas provides a compass to allow us to guide choices to be more balanced, peaceful and harmonious both on and off our mat. Cultivating the ability to identify and understand the nature of the gunas brings us closer to how we can stay unique and authentic in the most humane way.
Humanity is not defined by patterns that can be reproduced regardless of how much we would acquire knowledge and understanding of our psychic.
We might be able to fully reproduce the brain functions with artificial computation power but we will never be able to reproduce the “vibe” and the energy of a full-fledged person.
So that’s why staying fully human is more about being able to touch base with our energy levels and to understand what goes on beyond our masks of “influencers” in the online world.
Is privacy a solution?
We might hide our information from social media so we can keep our privacy and not let tech companies scrape our data from the internet so they can create behavioral models to influence our consumer choices but in the end, it’s about learning to tam those urges and desires and energies that drive us into a misbehaving.
As Richard Thaler said in his book Misbehaving, humans are different from “econs” with the simple difference that humans have emotions from energies we can’t predict with mathematical algorithms.
I see this as a brilliant example of what being fully human means when it comes to data science and tech. If it cannot be predicted it means it’s human! Their behavior is guided by feelings and emotions that can be interpreted but not reproduced in models that allow technology to “hack” our biology.
Where can someone influence biology without hacking your data?
But with all the influences of ads and media and technology changing how we eat and what we get as supplements or medicine, we might have another layer of stuff going on which is at the base of the Maslow pyramid of needs: the homeostasis one. In biology, homeostasis is a very interesting process that assures balance of your body internally even when the outside circumstances in the environment are changing.
While this very basic need can be met most of the time by keeping the body temperature stable, with all the current climate changes and virus invasions happening, this becomes a more conscious effort in our daily lives. But what’s more intriguing is that homeostasis is also assured by the level of glucose in the blood and has a direct impact in the gut.
When we look at the worst addictions that go under the radar we see sugar being the top addiction that causes deaths. There are more people dying of heart disease than anything else in the world. And heart disease comes from diabetes and cholesterol problems which makes it clear that we can be “hacked” directly at a biological level if we let ourselves persuaded into commercials that play with our cortisol levels ( also known as the stress hormone) which triggers the need for sugar to balance the glucose in the blood because it will produce more of it in stressful situations.
There’s no conspiracy here, it’s just pure speculation of the course of nature and the way our environment is changing and thus forcing us to change what otherwise was not challenged for thousands of years.
The philosopher Karl Popper said that if our human biology cannot develop something intrinsically then our mind will produce the way for that object to be created externally so we can make use of it.
What this means is that our transformation capacity is limited to our body but our mind can produce anything it wants and with the help of technology externalize the way in which we obtain the result that otherwise internally could not be controlled. However, if the external conditions start forcing us to change within, what happens to humans then?
Without question, this type of transformation requires more than just the change in temperature caused by climate change. But it does start from there. The more we need to produce food in labs and greenhouses to supply cities and people with food, the more we end up losing the natural biotope which provides us the diversity of chemical elements that make up the immune system for defending us from nature coming against us.
So how much can the biotope change influence us as humans?
My story as an expat might be something relevant for the exemplification: back in Romania, agriculture is still done in traditional ways. There is little to no pesticides and fertilizers used in growing the grains that give us our daily bread. We don’t even call it bio because it’s a given that it’s mostly bio. The type of bread I ate as a child was healthy and I hd no dietary restrictions. However, at age 24 I moved to the Netherlands. Here I started eating the bread made with dutch grains. I immediately started feeling bloated all the time. I changed many other aspects of my life so I can’t isolate the cause of my stomach going crazy from only this source. I also became vegetarian one year previous to moving abroad. That also contributed to me gaining weight from that new lifestyle. But I gained almost 20kg in 6–8 months time. The transition was noticeable but then I was also cycling a lot so most of the weight became muscle power. It’s now about 40% of my body weight which is a lot higher than most athletes.
However, the reality of the biotope contributing to our gut bacteria diversity is real. Look at how 2 generations ago, coffee was something we mostly had from a wholesale source so basically we had no real trace of where we got our coffee from. Now we mostly buy origin coffee and we know where most of our food is coming from because otherwise, we risk allergies.
Have you noticed how many people have allergies these days?
The reason why our biology doesn’t go as fast as our ability to travel and completely change environments is that we are supposed to have a balance between what we put ourselves through as challenges and what resilience and flexibility we incorporate from our diverse experiences.
The 3rd culture kid phenomenon and intensive travel outcomes
The rise of kids growing up in mixed families creates a new type of human genome which is actually encouraging because it creates the opportunity for a more resilient human body. This type of “migration” enabled by the “Easy Jet” generation is actually forcing the human biology evolution to its edge. It allows for different genes to be combined and naturally and gradually extend human resilience to very different climates, biotope and disease resistance, and immunity. By enhancing the natural resistance of the human body, some of the natural selection methods become crucial for the population that doesn’t move as much as the one that does. For example, if more products are made for the “world-citizen” human biology, it means that less of the mass production will cater to the needs of people in remote areas where not much genetical diversity happens. This not only creates premises for the future of illnesses that can develop from the mutations these people would suffer to alter the long term effects of such a food revolution, but it also allows people to think more of the effects of globalization and having mass production as the only way to feed everyone.
Going back to the roots and traditional farming having been ongoing movements that try to counterattack the effect of globalized food production and methods, however, the consequences of having these types of traditional farmers are not mentioned in relation to the human genome evolution.
The extensive gentrification of old methods of farming and rural areas are seen in most of the western cities. However, nobody is talking about the ways in which our interpersonal relationships need to change so we adjust the next generation to the new environmental conditions. The natural migrations from the rural areas to the cities in which moving to the city does not necessarily guarantee a better life shows that the human instinct to survive is reorienting from creating external resources to generating internal resilience by forming new lifestyles, new partnerships, and new mixed families as a way to escape the natural selection consequences.
What does third culture mean in such a context?
The “third culture” means that you have more than one reference system to orientate your life upon not only psychologically but also genetically. When we see mixed-race kids we clearly see the 3rd culture effect in the skin tone but what if that is not as visible as a skin tone? What if the difference is actually in the psychological power to adapt and to tune into 2 different systems of reference? Then this is the future that we can’t see as clearly anymore because it’s lines are blurred and most of us now have mixed blood between 2–3 or more nationalities. The biggest migrations up to date were caused by wars but while that left quite big scars on our cultures and made us think of mixing race as something bad, it’s time to rethink that now that we see these things happening due to completely different circumstances of less negative impacts. The economical migrations have generated many mixed-culture families and so is the internationalization of many companies, the remote working opportunities, the changing of the dating landscape and many other factors that influence migration.
To conclude, the effects of our lack of presence with regards to important life decisions makes us more likely to fall into the crowd that goes on auto-pilot and gets influenced by media on their decision-making processes whereas those that take full ownership over their choices will thrive in spite of all technologies created to manipulate and biohack our humanness.