Lately we like to tell ourselves that human value lives in the glitch.
AI is an expert at predicting past patterns, optimizing for the most likely future. It thrives in Level 1 chaos1, predictable systems where the rules don’t change.
We flatter ourselves by claiming we live at a Level 2 chaos2 environment and that we are the unpredictable spark. We want to believe that when a Black Swan hits and the optimized system breaks down, our intuition is some superior form of intelligence, a feature arising from an error.
But is that really true evolution, or just another layer of biological noise?
Maybe the glitch isn’t a feature.
Maybe it’s just the friction of our biological machine slowly wearing out, mistaking its own decay for purpose, in a universe that doesn’t care about the rules of either game… or us.
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Level 1 Chaos: does not react to predictions about it. For example, the weather; no matter how much we forecast a storm, the storm itself does not alter its trajectory because of our prediction. ↩
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Level 2 Chaos: that reacts to predictions about it. For example, the stock market or human behavior; predicting a market crash changes investor behavior, which in turn alters the predicted outcome itself. ↩