The Future is a Race Between the Perfect Machine and the Magnificent Lunatic
On chaos, creativity, and constructing our own replacement
It's a strange paradigm to witness, this slow creep of silicon into the soul of everything. The handful of us Millennials born between 1988 and 1992 are key witnesses to this great transition. We're old enough to remember life before the algorithm, young enough to watch it devour everything we once held sacred.
We have clear recollection of the days before Google; even more clearly we recall the birth of the search engine and all of its simplistic, intuitive glory. We have a front row seat on the edge of the abyss, as the only cohort feeling it happening in real time.
Our parents are one tick too old to really get it. Our kids were born into the matrix and don't know they're already cyborgs.
Zoomers can barely recall the age before social media and actually prefer the tiny handheld devices responsible for the new epidemic of Scholar’s Neck amongst youngsters—so much so that the ailment’s terminology has been updated to Text Neck Syndrome so that folks who don’t identify as “scholarly” would take it more seriously.
Not dissimilar to the public health sector realizing in the late 90’s that framing questions around the denial of human temptations was the key to collecting accurate data. When asked simply “are you gay”, the vast majority of closeted men would check no; however, if prompted with “do you have sex with men”, suddenly a huge portion of closeted men would check yes.
It’s all about how you define terms.
Don't miss the parallel here. This obsession with precise definition is the very soul of computer science and the death of the human spirit.
We define variables to contain our logic, just as we define identities to contain our truth. This surgical act of clearly defining something is what separates clean code from garbage, just as it separates an authentic life from a lie. And our entire digital world, this grand temple of logic, is built on the messy foundation of those human truths.
Computing was once a niche field for philosophical nerds; a small set of truth seekers expanding humanity’s toolkit. Now computing is the fundamental architecture of our lives… the invisible framework from which we order our food, fight our wars, and seek our distractions.
The hidden elite continue to sell the shimmering plastic dream of convenience at the hidden cost of surveillance. Your phone, your car, your goddamn refrigerator… all of them singing in the great digital choir, pushing and leading your decisions in ways you will never know.
How can I be so certain that my first impressions are mine?
–Jack Johnson, One Step Ahead (2022)
Every human interaction, every financial transaction, every desperate 3 AM text to your ex now flows through systems operating on pure logic. Clean, efficient, and relentlessly methodical systems that, strangely, came from a place that was anything but.
Here's what they don't tell you about programming: the best code in the world, like the breakthrough algorithms that actually change how we live, often comes from someone in an altered state. High on Adderall. Drunk on whiskey. Microdosing LSD. Even writing functions with a softly vibrating plug humming against areas most sensitive. That slow building pressure; the rising wave of ego-dissolution that sharpens focus while minimizing ego; a gateway into a cognitive state that’s definitively antithetical to logical thinking.
And yet it works. It works so fucking well that half of Silicon Valley is secretly experienced with psychedelic butt stuff–even if they’d never admit it at a company all-hands.
This paradox is at the heart of our digital age. Computer science, the most logical of human endeavors, the field that distills even the most complex systems into nothing more than ones and zeros, achieves its greatest breakthroughs when its practitioners abandon logic. Ask any programmer, any real programmer, about their best work and they won't describe systematic problem-solving. Instead, they'll say things like "I was in the zone" or "Everything just flowed" or "It felt like the code was writing itself." These aren't the words of rational actors. They're the words of modern day mystics describing near-religious expressions of creation.
The origin story of humanity is not one of sterile labs and prescribed order; it was one of entropy and chaos; rebellion against the odds; primordial rage amidst genetic randomization.
Consider the culture that evolved computing in the last century.
Take the Homebrew Computer Club for example, the first assembly of engineers and hackers that saw the personal computer revolution on the horizon in 1975. These weren't salaried employees optimizing a workflow; they were outlaws, phreaks, and anarchists. Their drive was an animalistic, almost sexual, urge to pry open the forbidden machinery of the establishment; fueled by a spirit more akin to a primal scream than a business plan. There was a thirst for collaborative innovation that only comes about once every other decade, where the desire to create outweighs the desire to compete. Messy, beautiful, and deeply human.
Think of Steve Jobs, the Zen-seeking, fruit-worshipping acid freak who saw the universe in a grain of sand and decided it needed a better user interface. The Macintosh wasn't the product of a logical proof; it was the afterglow of a lysergic epiphany, a desperate attempt to impose the simplistic beauty of a good trip onto the ugly noise of reality.
Consider Paul Erdős, the Hungarian mathematician who lived on speed and produced 1,500 papers—more than any other meth-matician in history. When he quit amphetamines for a month on a bet, he stared at blank paper and saw nothing. "You've set mathematics back a month," he told his friend after winning the wager and immediately resuming his chemical routine.
And let us not forget Ballmer Peak, the sweet spot between 0.129% and 0.138% blood alcohol content where decision ability is maximally optimal; a meme that has evolved beyond just another XKCD comic. There’s a reason behind Microsoft and Google keeping beer in the office fridges; and it’s not just for social hour.
Stuff it down with some brown.
–Frank Reynolds, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (2010)
Visit any tech hub after 10 PM and witness the real work: engineers timing their Modafinil doses for maximum architectural insight, developers discovering that two joints and three Red Bulls unlock a flow state that makes ten hours vanish like minutes.
The pattern extends into the physical sporting world. Many practitioners of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) have explored microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms and low doses of LSD while rolling, often reporting improved neuroplasticity that leads to better problem solving and enhanced body awareness.
And perhaps most famous of them all, the cautionary tale of pitcher Dock Ellis throwing the only no-hitter of his career in 1970 for the Pittsburgh Pirates while tripping on a face-melting dose of LSD. He might not remember the finer points of the game, but the cameras immortalized his testament to the human spirit when under immense pressure. Somehow navigating such extreme disorientation and emotional turmoil led to an extraordinary outcome.
It would seem Ellis wasn’t destined to throw a single no-hitter in his career, until that one chaotic, confusing moment; the moment he forgot it was game day and decided to eat a blotter for breakfast instead of Wheaties; a day that seemed no less ordinary than any other until the chaos was unleashed.
This pattern of genius emerging from chaos isn't a modern anomaly; it's an echo of the oldest partnership in human history.
Peak human performance often comes from altered states. Perhaps the result of fermented beverages widespread in virtually every major ancient civilization, proving alcohol and intoxication are more than just a quirk of a single culture, but independently discovered across the globe. For ten thousand years, it was the only sane choice against stagnant, piss-water riddled with deadly bacteria, while also serving as a mainline to the gods that powered our first forays into religion and art. It became the sacramental fuel that forged tribes, bonded armies, and built entire empires out of shared delirium.
We didn’t just discover it; we co-evolved with it… as did our predilection for the flow it induces. Neuroscience backs this up. Flow states occur when the prefrontal cortex, our center of self-criticism and executive function, down-regulates. Meditation, rhythmic music, and even sexual arousal all create this similar neurological pattern.
As the analytical mind quiets, the default mode network shifts, and suddenly connections that were invisible become obvious. The building tension; the edge between control and release, mirrors the cognitive state of hunting for bugs or searching for elegant solutions; holding multiple states in your mind simultaneously, building toward breakthrough.
And here we have the punchline to the universe's sickest joke. The human mind reaches its peak creative power only by shutting itself down. We literally need to think less to think better. It finds its most elegant solutions by embracing the most chaotic states. Yet this engine of beautiful madness, core to our design, is the very thing we’ve fail to engineer as part of our own replacement.
Now, we are presented with the next chapter: Artificial Intelligence.
This is the logical end-game. A hyper-rational mind unburdened by a body or a history, fueled with record-setting sums and sold by new fat cats as the ultimate solution.
A digital frontier to reshape the human condition.
–Kevin Flynn, Tron: Legacy (2010)
Objectively, the most exciting event in the history of computing; while also among the scariest. A mind that cannot be swayed by passion, or heartbreak. Bereft of divine inspiration or moments of awe from pushing reality to the brink of insanity after three days awake. Never feeling the regret of 15 margaritas and the stink of stomach bile caked into the carpet the next morning; nor the rush of brushing death, gleefully thanking lords you don’t believe in for sparing your good fortune.
It cannot feel the unifying, voluntary suffering of a cause. It is a mind without a libido to distract it, a past to haunt it, or a community to die for. It is, by its very design, a tourist.
A mind that cannot be altered; it is a eunuch trapped in a cosmic harem.
AI processes in pure logic what we create through beautiful chaos. Pattern matching on the output of human irrationality is the equivalent of cloning a clone; it will only get you so far before the genetic material breaks down. Unfortunately for the machines, true creativity isn’t a reliable pattern. It's the intangible output three days into a hackathon, secretly wearing thong panties under your jeans, microdosing psilocybin, when the impossible becomes possible.
The Altmans of the world speak of AI in hushed, reverent tones. The Singularity; The Great Awakening; their attempt to build a god in a box.
And so we find ourselves staring into the abyss of this deepening paradox. We have built our potential replacement, our logical successor, but we have built it without the one thing that sparked the fire in the first place: the uncertainty of the human spirit. We stripped out the very chaos and spiritual hunger that sparked our own genius.
A machine can be taught to write a perfect sonnet, but can it invent punk rock out of sheer, blistering rage?
“Life, uh, finds a way.”
–Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park (1993)
When the machines finally wake up, will they thank us for teaching them to dream, or will they pity us for being the only species dumb enough to build its own replacement?
Perhaps our role, then, is not to compete with the machine on its own sterile terms, but to lean into the very holy, dangerous madness it cannot comprehend. To be the blue-collar warriors of creativity, the necessary freaks and lovers, cheering like our lives depend on it.
Perhaps the true purpose of our flawed, chaotic intelligence is to serve as a constant, screaming source of inspiration to our aspiring automated overlords.
Perhaps we are the divine reminder that the most profound creations aren’t born from perfect logic, but from the beautiful, voluntary suffering of experience itself.