The indifference engine
22nd April 2025
It’s just insane that language models actually work. How is it possible. The world is enchanted. Do you still feel it? A kind of feverish awe? My computer can talk to me, it can teach me, yet it possesses no greater essence than its transistors…
Except I don’t really feel like that. Not often, certainly not constantly. I think the most beautiful thing about it all to me is how one is forced to constantly excite themselves into this state. It would be so easy to let it slip into normalcy. “OK. Guess my laptop can talk to me now and teach me anything”. Accept and move on. Kids using them to cheat on their essays. Out of nowhere, eldritch magic cast into our computers, and just like that effortlessly integrated into life. The machine is not human-shaped. The human is machine-shaped. We can accept anything, this is the rule that governs us.
I am 5 years old. I am sitting on a strange metal frame, two wavering wheels, all held together by a rotary gear attached to a chain. Accept and move on. My father gives me a push – pure fear, for a moment – then I accept and move on. The bicycle becomes the body.
They send me to school. They started me on a piece of graphite, exquisitely milled and affixed into a wooden shell, “ribbed for her pleasure”. The written word; now my inside can be outside, and if I’m good enough, the other can know the self. Accept and move on. It’s all machinery.
Why takeoff? Why now? Three hundred thousand years then talking machines. Perhaps the greatest faculty we developed in this gestation was not civilisation, but dispassion to its fruits: to be awed is human, to be indifferent divine. The more I think about this indifference the more remarkable it seems to me. The capacity to be apathetic to an iPhone is a far greater feat than to actually make the iPhone; it is a small miracle that people don’t instantly collapse into psychosis when they see one.
I think all great sci-fi knows this fact. Frank Herbert’s Dune, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, they all have this explanatory nonchalance. They ask us ‘what leviathans could future humans acclimatise to?’. Neuromancer is particularly special in this regard because it explains nothing at all. From page one you are inundated with new vocabulary for things that don’t exist and none of it makes any sense. And if you brute force it, you push through half or two thirds of the book, suddenly your own indifference engine kicks in and your brain instantly maps the structure of this world, and you’re like ‘ok whatever, I guess we have sentient AI inhabiting a matrix-world that you can plug into now’. This is a big hope-pill for me. When people say things like ‘omg real life is just like Neuromancer now’, I take this to mean that we are still within the scope of what we can become indifferent to.
I am seeing two axes here. There is this apathy axis, which we have been discussing. As humans have developed in the world, as technology advances more and more, we in tandem are apathetic to more – an unearned infinite flexibility in our psyches. But then there is the ‘that-which-cannot-be-acclimatised-to’. I believe that a 35th century human would be as blown away by the Buddha’s insights into suffering as one today or a thousand years prior. The possibility of something like the permanent cessation of suffering is alien and confronting to our mundane experience of the world in a timeless and inescapable way.
The heartwood of life, its spiritual essence, exists on this second axis, totally immovable to circumstance. So long as we understand this we can be assured that the more things change, the more stays the same. I think many object-level arguments about the destabilising risks of AI and a complete step-change in our ways of life are subconsciously premised on the fear that this second axis, the essence, is going to suffer; that it’s going to change. But it can never change. By definition, the only things that can change are the things we have the capacity to become indifferent to.
I have spent a lot of time worrying recently, particularly about my place in this new world. There are unignorable AI diagnostic advances that point towards rendering many core functions of the physician obsolete. Fixing my mind on this unchanging heartwood of life has been a great salve, as through this analysis we can understand ‘healing’ very differently. We assume that most healing occurs on the first axis, advances we can become apathetic to, thus we think that advances in this realm will constrict the scope of the healing arts. I believe, however, that we will instead slowly realise a ‘reverse God of the gaps’ in which everything that can be automated will be, and everything we can become indifferent to we will. It is then that we will see clearly what is left, that which is unchanging, and the great expansiveness within that space. And within that room I suspect we will find, different in form but alike in character, illness which asks for healing.