Late last month, a video went viral showing a humanoid robot running a test sprint in an athletics arena ahead of a competition race at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing. At the start of the clip we see the robot running at full speed along the oval track. But instead of turning with the track lanes, the robot continues straight on and slams into a padded wall, bouncing back and collapsing onto the ground in a mechanical seizure of sparks.
Like many people who watched that video, I found it both astonishing and disconcerting. I also smiled and shook my head at the assumption by its creators that a machine could truly mimic and replace a human in all of its complexity. As my feeds served up repost after repost of the strangely addictive video posted on other accounts, I was struck by the feeling that this footage contained an extremely powerful metaphor.
Not long before, a friend who hosts an interview podcast mentioned to me his idea of asking every guest at the end of his show what they consider to be the biggest problem in the world and how we should address it. When I asked myself how I would answer, I at first drew a blank. There are so many problems and issues afflicting the world, which would I select above all others—and why? The question stayed with me and incubated in my mind while I watched the video of the robot crashing into the wall about a dozen times, at which point I knew what my answer was. It’s something that I’ve often thought about but hadn’t properly turned over, or articulated, until watching the robot crash video.
It is the propensity for human beings to overreach by pursuing progress too far in one direction: to pursue an objective in a linear fashion, as though one could do so infinitely, regardless of the consequences or diminishing returns generated when moving past a certain point. The nascent cyborg sprinter charging blindly past the point where it should have turned or stopped and crashing into the wall, seemed a perfect metaphor for this idea. It was at the same time a reflection of the runaway train that is our headlong rush to develop AI. The pursuit of technological advancement at any and all costs, including our humanity, can potentially end in calamity. It may be one of the greatest examples of potential human overreach given the breakneck pace of advancement without due consideration to the implications.
When Progress Becomes Counterproductive
I think of this tendency as the progression paradox: the point at which progress pursued beyond an optimal limit begins producing diminishing returns, or even the opposite of what was originally intended.
This same compulsion to follow a line of action endlessly has resulted in paradoxically opposite outcomes in so many endeavours. Human history is littered with the unintended consequences of our actions taken too far. One can even argue it is a record of them. It is so common, in fact, that one needn’t plumb the depths of history to see them. Here are just a few from more contemporary times:
• Commercial logging and fishing companies have frequently over-harvested their resources, putting themselves out of business for periods and endangering the existence of the very thing they (and also, we, at another level) rely upon for their livelihood.
• Car designers and computer and smartphone software developers continue to revise features in new models and releases for the sake of newness, upselling and the perceived need to stay ahead of competitors. This they do, even though these technologies, for all intents and purposes, have already reached something close to optimal usability. Functionality is sacrificed as ideas they can’t improve upon are replaced and added to by clumsier and overly-complicated ones. Driving a new car now can be like flying a plane.
• The tendency of bureaucracies to add ever more regulations and procedures on top of (and sometimes in contradiction to) the old creates increasingly stultifying and sclerotic barriers to getting things done. The institutional need to demonstrate activity and forward movement results in ever more schemes resulting in further obstacles.
• Western governments, compelled by compassion and the beneficial and economically necessary aspects of moderate and controlled immigration, pursued a ‘more is more’ approach and welcomed too many new arrivals—but without being able to absorb and integrate them. This has resulted in increased political, economic, demographic destabilization.
• Throughout history seemingly well-intentioned political projects aiming to create utopias and free people from various forms of oppression, had the exact opposite effect: tyranny, war and societal collapse. Communism, fascism and various theocratic projects are just a few examples of such attempts. Similarly, forcefully trying to export democracy everywhere and at any cost has similarly uprooted societies.
• When decades of social activism achieved many of its successes, its proponents continued to pursue rights in an ever narrower, granular and dogmatic fashion down to the smallest group interest—but increasingly at odds with interests of the majority and the realities of daily life. The political correctness that arose and the fanaticism around its enforcement (i.e., the pursuit of inclusion going so far as to become exclusion) was likely a major contributor to the rise of the now damaging countervailing political forces that have taken hold in many places today, including the United States.
What these, and other examples, show is that there is a deep paradox built into the pursuit of goals that lack any sense of limits. If you go too far in one direction, you start to get the opposite outcome of what you intended. Progress is inherently paradoxical if taken too far. If you travel westward far enough, you’ll arrive in the east.
Our culture has no widely shared idea that an endeavour can reach an optimal point, beyond which further effort becomes less effective or actively harmful. Contrary to our desires and the narratives in our heads, life shows us that there is an end to any enterprise beyond a certain point because you simply can’t improve upon it, you will go too far, and/or the costs will be too great henceforth.
Iain McGilchrist and the Problem of Linear Thinking
British scholar and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, author of The Matter With Things, attributes this psychological and perceptual conundrum to the workings of the left hemisphere of the brain. The left brain, whose nature, outlook and function revolve around grasping, control, mechanicality, manipulation, absence of doubt, and viewing the world in a linear and decontextualized fashion, drives our endless pursuits and makes us blind to their consequences. Our culture, McGilchrist tells us, has disproportionately cultivated and emboldened left brain thinking at the expense of our right hemisphere (with which it works in tandem), which sees the world holistically, contextually, intuitively, and is emotionally and socially intelligent enough to admit uncertainty and appreciate the existence of consequences. McGilchrist argues that the right hemisphere should provide the broader context within which the left hemisphere operates, rather than the reverse. It is also the natural antidote to our endless drives.
In a YouTube interview with Mark Vernon, McGilchrist says:
“There is a good point at which to stop pushing in a certain direction. That is something we absolutely don’t understand anymore. We think that things are just linear and if you keep on pushing in a certain direction you’ll achieve further and further distance from what you wanted to leave behind. Actually and unfortunately space is curved, mental space is curved and time is curved. And what happens as you push is that you achieve the precise opposite of what it was you meant to achieve. So, as you say, there is a part of our brain that is devoted to helping us to survive. It is a bit of an irony that it is actually that part of our brain that is now making us effectively soon extinct.”
Hubris, Wisdom Traditions and Knowing When to Stop
Cultures throughout history had roughly corresponding ideas to this. One was the ancient Greek notion of hubris: an arrogant defiance of natural or divine limits that triggers nemesis—an inevitable cosmic or social retaliation and correction. This theme occurs repeatedly in ancient Greek lore, myths and storytelling. The ancient historian Thucydides in his account of the Peloponnesian War, for instance, argued that Athens’ imperial overreach and unchecked ambition and desire to dominate led to its eventual catastrophic defeat at the hands of the Spartans. The collapses of empires, civilizations and societies have often been interpreted in similar terms: as consequences of ambitions pursued beyond sustainable limits.
East Asian Taoist philosophy, too, emphasizes the need to cultivate a dynamic equilibrium in our lives: understanding natural limits, sensing when further effort becomes counterproductive, and acting without forcing reality beyond a certain point. Lao Tzu writes in the Tao Te Ching:
“Know contentment
And you will suffer no disgrace;
Know when to stop
And you will meet with no danger.
You can then endure.” (1)
The late Anglo-Afghan author and savant, Idries Shah, who translated and reworked ancient Sufi ideas for a Western audience, also spoke frequently about this. He wrote that Sufis, the mystical thinkers and doers of the Middle East and Central Asia (and their counterparts elsewhere), have always known and operated under the premise that all organizations, efforts, societies are organic—that they come into being, fade and die because the nature of life is flux. Relatedly, there is a prerequisite and optimal time, place and people for any enterprise. Shah argued that Sufis would cut short efforts or end projects once they were no longer fruitful or productive, or stopped having the intended effect. Or worse: if they promised to have the opposite effect.
Can We Learn When to Pull Back?
How, if at all, can we begin to address this tendency?
The progression paradox has to become a culture-wide notion and understanding, something taught in schools. We need to better see our lives, and the world, and our pursuits more in terms of their limitations—and the complexity, and warping effects, of the world in which they operate. We need to recognize earlier when an action or enterprise has come to a fruitful end, or is having a negative effect, or the opposite effect from the one intended. This absolutely requires valuing and cultivating the type of wisdom evidenced in the ideas of the Greek, Taoist and Sufi sources above. It also necessitates understanding the way our minds work: the brain hemispheres that authors Iain McGilchrist and Robert Ornstein have written about. That in turn can result in a healthy humility, flexibility and openness to change that can allow us to move in another direction if need be; even if it seems counter-intuitive and against one’s selfish short-term interests to do so.
This is easier said than done, and requires not just an advanced individual awareness and willingness to switch gears and move into the unknown, but also the ability for people to operate in this manner collectively. Can the warring parties in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the unwieldy and environmentally destructive Chinese fishing fleet (and its bureaucratic overlords), and the biggest industry players who created AI and the governments which use it, see the perils of rapid, uninhibited progression and pull back from the precipice in time? It may be too much to expect. But the fact that so many of us already do this individually at a much smaller level when we change careers, relationships, and pursuits we see stagnating, suggests that we may sometimes be capable of scaling up that judgment and recognizing when larger collective projects require the same course correction.
Given humanity’s global interconnectivity and that we more than ever share the same fate in space and time, the simple fact is we may not have a choice if we are to avoid the destiny of the robot sprinter slamming headlong into the wall.
(1) Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Translated by D. C. Lau. Penguin Classics, 2003. Chapter 44.