Where does the wild end, and the synthetic begin?
When I was in 5th grade, I complained to my teacher that "organic" and "artificial" didn't make sense. Windex is made out of chemicals, but chemicals are made out of rocks. And if it's the human touch that makes things artificial, does that mean humans are unnatural?
If a chimpanzee eats an ant off the end of a twig, isn't that kinda like highly processed food?
At seven, I had no conception of grey areas. Some things are obviously organic, some things are obviously artificial. Not knowing where the line of demarcation was bothered the sh*t out of me. But that fuzziness is what allows this dichotomy to paint so many pictures.
For example, our minds and bodies are wild. Many of us live in synthetic paradise, surrounded by skyscrapers, running water and bags of cheesy, crunchy, calorically dense, fluorescent orange snacks. Pretty cool.
The natural and artificial are constantly interacting. It's the fault line where so much interesting, useful, or tragic stuff occurs.
I've repeatedly had my life saved by injecting epinephrine (synthetic adrenaline hormone) into my thigh after eating a peanut, which very well could have been certified organic. These interactions are everywhere:
A computer can stop working because its chips get too much cheetoh dust on them.
A human can detect malware and save a network because they felt a 500ms lag in a program executing.
Machine learning algorithms are designed with evolution in mind. Not to mention attempts to engineer consciousness from silicon.
We've made flying so safe that sometimes our safety protocols are what put us in danger.
This divide between the wild and the synthetic is recursive. The concrete jungle is a synthetic wilderness. Computer viruses are wild synthetics. Large language models (LLMs) blur the lines.
From the synthetic, a new wilderness emerges.
And that's what I'm going to be writing about here for a while, hence the name Roots & Rooks. For our wild origins and for the rules-based games that we've constructed. And the new wildernesses being generated around us.
In chess, there is a phrase for when the situation on the board becomes complicated in a match against a more experienced player. The amateur been taken into a "dark forest". Simply too many unfamiliar combinations and permutations to calculate.
Even in a boardgame now dominated by computer algorithms, nature-based metaphors are instructive. In large part, because we're still a bunch of monkeys, no matter how many Bluetooth devices we accumulate.
I think this will be a fun frame to work in. And I'm cautiously optimistic that some useful narratives for organizations, policy wonks, and technologists will emerge. My goal is to write good stuff, which means publishing tempo may vary. Happy reading.
Stay safe,
Timber
