There’s a global obsession with finding a pill to elevate our mental abilities.
In The Matrix, Morpheus presented Neo with two pills—one that would allow him to return to his ordinary life and the other that would cause him to wake up from his programmed sleep.
In Lucy, the pills that were supposed to be ferried inside the individuals' bodies broke. The active ingredients found their way into the bloodstream, activating the different potentials of the brain. With time, Lucy’s brain capabilities took off to insane levels. Nas would call it:
Energy transferal, immortality
Then there was Limitless, a movie I can never forget. I was in high school.
I recall vividly where he set the TV — on one of the external marble-tiled slabs of the biology lab. There was likely a connection problem for us to sit outside in the cold of the night, focusing on a fantasy movie. Then again, we were high school boys. A little cold couldn’t faze us.
Bradley Cooper, who played the main actor, crossed paths with a pill that boosted his cognitive capabilities a thousandfold. He started drawing connections he never thought existed. Potential investment options. Avenues for getting rich. Developing business empires.
The kind of work he did would not have given him the bench to elevate to the insights he now drew after taking that pill.
In all the pill-enhancing movies, a commoner is chosen by forces unknown to us, the viewers. A commoner is an easy target because most of them don’t feature in movies. The story is bound to elicit emotion, appealing to the viewer’s possibilities of what would happen if they were granted these mental ‘superpowers’.
In Lucy, she became limitless to the point where she could transform into whatever form she wished. With my modest understanding of how the brain works and evolution, I now know it is impossible.
In The Matrix, superhuman abilities are exactly that — superhuman. However, we cannot fly, levitate, or slow down bullets.
Limitless, on the other hand, appeared achievable. The pill gives astronomical mental capabilities for roughly 24 hours, then you go back to your factory settings. It has the qualities of a drug, matching the practicalities we are familiar with. It also has the potential to become addictive. It is more relatable.
By the time the movie ended, I wanted that for myself.
Accessible Intelligence (AI)
When I started working in the bank, my brother gave me his flip phone. A faded pink LG. I didn’t know what to do with it besides downloading songs. Adelle and Linkin Park were my first picks. The rest of the time was spent listening to local radio stations.
Before being dispatched to our various banks, the cohort I was in underwent a week-long training. Or maybe it was two weeks. My memory fails me.
Anyway, this brief period was partly the reason I opted to change my career plans from engineering to medicine. For a brief couple of days, some of the top high school students were confined in a single space. I likened it to a temporary mini-Harvard or Oxford at the time.
It was also the time when I discovered the stylish phones my peers had. IDEOS was a popular one. It was as fast as it was stylish. Whenever our speakers asked questions whose answers we never knew, a friend I made at the place, Peter, would flash out his IDEOS and google it.
If I had such a phone, I would be an insane genius.
I consoled myself.
I loved reading. I still do. I imagined the level of knowledge I would have access to. At the same time, I wondered why this degree of ingenuity was lacking in the world. It didn’t make news headlines. I saw potential, and nobody was exploiting it.
I waited for that time when I would get such a phone. In the meantime, I would listen to music and read my hardcover books.
Today, I know how difficult it might be to become limitless. The reason is largely because limitlessness in itself is partly the reason we cannot attain superhuman mental capabilities. Nas reiterates:
It’s perspective, isn’t it?
It is.
Bradley Cooper needed to get more pills to feel different again. Before he discovered it, he could hardly have talked to anyone. After the pill, he had sex with a lady he had just met when walking out of the building where he worked.
He loved the high. So he chased it. Chasing the high is the common phrase used for addicts. You can disrupt your work, your relationships, and your health for it. This is what our main man did in the movie.
Initially, the pill was difficult to access. Over time, it became easier until he had a whole stash. He controlled the entire chain of its production. He became reliant on it.
Ease of access is the first step towards developing addictive traits. I didn’t have the IDEOS or, as I would soon call all of them, Android phones to slingshot my mental ‘prowess’.
Today, I consider it as AI bearing a definition different from its conventional one — accessible intelligence (AI). It is easy to access, like a pill.
It’s perspective, isn’t it?
My friend needed his IDEOS. Today, you only need access to the internet. AI is not artificial intelligence, it is accessible intelligence. Highly accessible.
It’s the kind of high accessibility that grants its users answers and solutions they never had. The more accessible, the more it’s used. We end up becoming users.
The two businesses that call their customers users are drugs and the internet. This accessible intelligence is potentially addictive because it is accessible to the commoner.
The pill in the movies targeted commoners. It is now available to commoners. And it has limitless potential. But it is also the reason we are not limitless. It’s all perspective.
Overabundance
Overdependence shrinks our abilities.
Dependence alone is known to downgrade our potential. If I need alcohol to steady my hands before doing an operation, I am dependent on it.
Overdependence is more than slavery. It has the potential to make you lose your identity. This is a symptom of the life of overabundance we live in.
When you walk into a bookstore, the shelves are countable. The sections are finite. Most hardly exceed ten. You don’t spend much time inside it, and after your purchase, you’re off.
Amazon has made shelves limitless.
A supermarket has sections. You wouldn’t want to spend your whole time inside it. The same goes for a mall.
Now, the internet, not just Amazon, has turned shopping sprees into limitless sections.
The infinite scroll function is the operational equivalent of limitlessness. And it has primed on our tendency to seek the easier option. Avoiding obstacles is what our brains have always wanted.
The brain is not adapted to becoming smart. It has grown to help us overcome difficulties. Since scarcity was the age-old problem, it found ways of overcoming it. Iterated over time, it should help us improve our efficiency in tackling scarcity problems.
This could be through becoming smarter or getting someone else who is smarter than you to do the task. Enter accessible intelligence, AI. This has a team dedicated to developing algorithms that crawl the web to give almost instantaneous results.
The brain has found its best assistant. It is readily accessible. It can be highly accurate. It is limitless.
But this wouldn’t make us limitless. It will make us overdependent. This overdependence is a side effect of overabundance.
In an age of overabundance, scarcity is hardly a problem. The brain then does what it does best — rationing rationality.
Social media today is the default mode of work. You’re either using AI to help you work or have AI use you when taking time off from it to scroll through your social media pages.
The more time we spend on social media, the harder it is for people to talk to each other. Why? Most people spend time entertaining each other rather than talking to each other.
And nobody cares a hoot about you on social media. They will find your viral content. Like. Share. And just as fast, will move on to the next one. Entertainment. Little incentive to develop stronger, meaningful bonds.
Overabundance makes it easier to move on to the next one because there is little to lose. How can you lose in the age of overabundance?
Everything, we do whatever we want, can’t front
Yo, I love this feeling
Loss is now seen in opting not to participate or not sharing. Freya India wrote about the ease with which people document their lives for the sake of attention from those who barely care about you.
This is a state borne from overabundance.
The unparalleled feature of overabundance is limitlessness.
But, because we have limitless access, we ourselves are not limitless in our abilities. It is the abilities of the tools surrounding us. Not us.
It is easy to claim that it is human abilities that are now limitless, but there’s a difference between what you can do and what you can do with the help of AI (accessible intelligence). Complexities of attaining limitlessness evolve from this step.
It’s perspective, isn’t it?
What I’m trying to say is…
Limited access creates value because it is limited. A paywalled article, a subscription, an exclusive club.
Limitlessness does the opposite. There is a whole world of content waiting for me. Why spend time on one? So I scroll.
A whole list of potential spouses out there, so why focus on just one? So I swipe.
An efficient team of developers is working on developing the best AI, so why should I struggle with work?
Limitlessness and overabundance are becoming self-limiting features of humans’ humanity and innate capability. The commoner has been fed the easily accessible drug, and now they are hooked. AI and social media. Self-driving cars may worsen our abilities even more.
The gospel is that these tools will free us to pursue our interests, but which interests when AI takes the most of one’s thinking and social media takes the most of one’s free time?
Limitlessness has turned out to be the opposite of what I initially dreamed of.
It’s perspective, isn’t it?
This song inspired some of the lines used in this article. Source — YouTube