Wandering as Competitive Advantage

Thursday, June 29th, 2023

In Essay 1, I talked about how the world wants to be filled with NPCs (non-player characters) -- those who follow social programming, and the first sign that you may resist this mode is a mutation.

In Essay 2, I wrote on The Dark and Light Sides to Mimesis - How Copying Can Either Kill You or Save You.

In Essay 3, I write that the Wanderer versus the Linear Optimizer may be the winner in the new world.

Unleashing Kids

Today I went into the Presidio for some meetings but I was still watching over my two daughters, aged 9 and 11.

The current challenge has been getting them to make their own "camp" -- basically 12 weeks of self-directed study.

It has not been easy. I'm puzzled and scared. But it's process, not an event.

I give them freedom to ask ChatGPT on how to structure their day, but their only real desire is to play Roblox or watch Mr. Beast.

These are ways one can end up being an NPC if a parent is not careful.

However, I told them their alternative is to go back into the SFUSD during the Summer, which would be indoctrination. They definitely don't want that.

So I gave them a map, I found some "geocaching codes" -- cards published by the national park with hints on geocached goodies, and let them loose.

They didn't find anything, and eventually came back to home base at the designated time, bored.

But it's a start.

Wandering As Foundation Model for Humans

In the near-future, any kind of repeatable work will become lower and lower cost. AI has accelerated this.

This means operational tasks, scaffolding work, and even information-based content creation can be outsourced to AI or AI+humans.

Human brains that train themselves on linear approaches to life and operational or information-retrieval roles will be forever at the mercy of robots and AI.

Humans need to form surprising connections across disparate, perhaps unconventional disciplines.

The famous story of Steve Job's finding the connection between calligraphy and his approach to fonts for the Macintosh illustrates such unexpected discoveries.

These are often seen as serendipitous stories.

Now, this will be essential to survival.

AI is less likely to form such connections across unrelated corpuses of knowledge. In part, because these connections are difficult to make -- even for humans -- because the associations and applications are non-linear.

Unfortunately, the NPC-mode is the opposite: it depends upon a linear progression to predictable content ingestion and reproduction.

What Does This Mean?

It's quite possible that every one will be a free agent.

If you haven't escaped NPC-mode, you will be an interchangeable node in the gig economy, doing whatever hasn't been automated through robots and AI.