Listening to yet another Joe Rogan podcast about AI, I had a thought:
We (humans) are afraid of (human-to-human) contracts.
We not just fear making them, we fear enforcing them.
And this is why we are seeking proxies and agentic intelligence to arbitrate transactions and values amongst us, because we cannot bring ourselves to face reality.
A great deal of the responsibility lies with those who are making humans afraid of engaging safely and wholly in operating and transacting in this world. Primarily, they are doing so by disrupting the rules of behavior and containment in an interconnected system that is this world of humanity.
People who are violating boundaries that are established amongst humans, and humans and other creation are doing great violence, because they compel everyone else to change their parameters, behavior and negotiations.
They alter the nature of incentives.
The create anxiety.
By creating harm and taking advantage, they make it appear as if bad behavior is getting rewarded, and therefore the logical incentive is to abandon good behavior, and join the chaos, take part in exploitation, harm or betrayal and sabotage, and suspend responsibility.
As a response to their bad behavior, the choices of other humans are to join the bandwagon, to do something even worse, or get dismayed and give up participation in the system and its transaction. The Bad Faith players see this as not just a tactical but often moral win, reasoning that they won because they are morally superior and rightly-guided.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
What is far more alarming to me is that humans are signaling and transmitting this behavior to non-human forms as well.
We are wrongly incentivizing viruses, bacteria, animals, and even artificial intelligence—transmitting to them our diseased thinking and flawed and contaminated patterns. We are creating “wrong incentives” for viruses and bacteria by, for instance, messing up how we administer defensive medicine and at what thresholds, and we are badly incentivizing viruses by mishandling containment and development. We are confusing animals for our living children, and ignoring disease vectors by assuming excessive humanlike intimacy. With AI, we are confusing agentic intelligence for autonomous, causative and creative intelligence; it may be a great mimic of the same, but it is not source intelligence. We additionally do not pay good attention to container resilience vis-a-vis the ability of the intelligence, and what it is tasked to do and at what cost.
All these are forms of contract underdevelopment and mismanagement.
It gets even worse: Offenders and the ignorant are seeing this contamination and violation as something miraculous and a vindication of “humanity”, inclusion, love.
We are celebrating the decline, decay and degradation of humanity.
Contracts and determination are being seen not just as violence but also, at times, fascism.
(This does not mean that genuine fascism, detrimental control and anti-life behavior does not exist or is licensable. It means, rather, that there is a rise is mislabeling and also in seeing things highly subjectively and not from a more objective and neutral point-of-view. Subjectivism is interesting and flavorful, but objectivism is fairer.)
A Return to Contracts:
Rather than seeing contracts as constrictive, detrimental or controlling, we have to see them as aides to building structures and creating a regulation that runs on its own for the most part because it is defined and operationalized.
Human life is complicated and complex, and the modern human especially lived in a very detailed world with excessive elements, entities, transactions and decisions. We also interact with an immense number and kinds of humans and are exposed to an onslaught of diverse values and cultures. This is bringing rapid information to our nervous systems in a constant stream, at all times. Contracts and structures help us stay stabilized and grounded and refer to what agreements have been made and what rules and bindings have been laid down.
Why the Fear?
Our fear of contracts may be dual: one is the fear of constricting the other or being constricted by them; and the other is the fear of enforcement of contract.
The first is more understandable, and easier to understand: Contracts are limitations, and we fear that limitations will reduce and impact, and not aide, operations. However, limitless is not always useful to operating. If you want to drink a glass of water, would you rather have it in a container such as a glass, or would you let water be thrown on the floor or table from which you attempt to gather it or lick it up?
This means that containment and constriction are not always harmful or painful or harming purpose just because the words have negative connotation in our minds. Rather, the nature of reality shows, amply, that containment is useful. Fruits have skin. Water flows in riverbanks. Birds have flight paths.
Boundaries, containment, contracts, stipulations, are protective and helpful.
The other fear is less logical: the fear of enforcing a contract, the inability to hold it up and either become an offender or the victim of one.
This shying away from enforcement is complex.
It can come from genuine need to face-save, or to save relationing—the ability and the opportunity to staying connected, regardless of transactional nature, quantum, direction, due and correctness.
The solution is to understand that faulty relationing will eventually not be sustainable, will do damage and fall apart. Moreover, even a good and correct relationship does not last forever and only change is guaranteed, therefore on the balance it is wiser to confront and seek correctness than not.
It can come from lack of training on how to deal with this situation, and the fear that one will either overdo, under-do, or do wrong or uninformed.
The solution to this challenge is to learn to create, hold, and establish contracts. Of critical importance is it to understand that Justice is vital to the correct functioning and ongoing operations of the world, and if we begin foregoing it due to shame or laziness, we will do great harm to the world. We will incentivize people incorrectly and we will train them in incorrect behaviors without the courage to call themselves or ourselves to account.
Another issue that proliferates in and sickens the world immensely today is to forgo accountability in the name of mercy or forgiveness. Forgiveness without accountability and reckoning is to create a field of false or absent signals, and that, in turn, dims the system’s ability to train the participants and to give them correct signals and guidance. A healthy system must have significant passive guidance for the members in the system, and that is possible only when we have correct methods and a legacy of doing the right thing and at the right time in right measure.
It is also vital to iteratively and often train humans to create, revise, refer to and enforce contracts, and not treatment them as forgettable artefacts, source of amusement or play, or irrelevant. Leading situations by whims and subjectivity; inability to read a situation and its components, inability to scope and measure a situation… are all blind spots in human training. Humans also need to build a natural, fluid, and intuitive understanding of justice and fairness. and learn the reasons behind why we do what we do, in order to have an internally developed conscience and consciousness that can then align with the matters on the outside. Merely trained reference to authority is not enough. The basis on which we transact, and the construction and logic of contracts are all subjects that require a detailed understanding. The root of this is to understand reality anatomically, understand its components, their capacity, nature, relations and roles.
Tip: To understand these matters better, refer to Ramala Hubb’Allah’s work, The Salaam Matrix.
