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[Reflections] 001 - The Thinking Game

ReflectionsAI

I just watched a documentary called The Thinking Game about DeepMind and how they solved the protein folding problem. Demis Hassabis. Chess prodigy at four. Neuroscience PhD to understand the brain. Then built the thing.

And I'm sitting here in my living room afterward feeling two things at once: fascinated and a little stupid.

Not stupid like I don't understand it. Stupid like -- why wasn't I that driven at that age? That curious? That locked in?

But that's not even the real question.

The real question is: where do humans fit now? AlphaGo made Move 37, a move no human would make, and it was creative. AlphaFold discovered novel proteins. That's not just calculation. That's something else.

So where do we fit? And then -- where do I fit within where we fit?

I don't know.

I ended up talking through this with Claude at like midnight, which is its own kind of irony. Processing my existential crisis about AI... with an AI model. But it actually helped me see something.

I said I don't have questions. That I'm not curious enough. And then I rattled off like a bunch of them without stopping:

  1. Why can't we extract energy from the sun at scale? We have a nuclear reactor in the sky blasting power in all directions and we can't use it.
  2. How do we get humans to space without these bulky suits? How do we actually live out there?
  3. Why, after all this evolution, can't humans share a planet peacefully?
  4. And the one that actually grips me: what happens to human purpose when survival is solved?

That last one isn't a shower thought. We evolved for the hunt. For scarcity. Every system of meaning we've built: religion, career, status. These are downstream of struggle. If we remove that, does it free us or break us?

I don't have answers. I'm not even sure I'm the one who's going to find them. But I think the people who ended up mattering: Newton, Einstein, Demis -- weren't trying to matter. They were trying to answer something. The legacy was a byproduct. So maybe the question isn't "what should I build" or "how do I leave a mark." Maybe it's simpler: what question won't leave me alone? I'm still figuring that out. But at least now I know I have them.