The Emptiness Machine

Part 1: Holodeck

If you lived on Star Trek's Enterprise, you could go to the holodeck and experience anything you'd like. In case you don't watch Trek, the holodeck is a simulator machine which lets the crew of the starship Enterprise experience whatever it is they miss from their life on Earth, whether it's walking on the beach, or rock climbing, or hooking up.[1]

But the holodeck would only be wildly popular in space. You'd expect a holodeck in every community the way we have movie theaters, or maybe every house would have one. This is the way we consume entertainment in real life! Books began as treasures in libraries, before becoming treasured personal property in homes and finally becoming cheap commodities available anywhere. Video games went from programs stealing time on precious academic mainframes, to pricey arcade boxes, to disposable gadgets found in every pocket. And the same thing has happened with everything else we've invented to help to pass the time.[2]

The holodeck poses some uncomfortable questions. If you can do anything you want inside the holodeck, why would you ever leave? It's easy to imagine people barricading themselves inside the holodeck, maybe people without strong social connections. Trek actually gets into this[3] in the context of an engineer who shirks his duties to retreat into a simulated life, but where Trek poses it as a novel event, it seems to me the Trek universe should have profound numbers of holo-addicts.

Yet Star Trek is far from the only example of the trope. Cyberpunk 2077 features "braindances", which are taped human experiences the user can re-experience in the first person, complete with full sensory and emotional data recorded straight from someone's brain in real time. Westworld features a cowboy-themed valley filled with colorful, sexy characters and dangerous wildlife, though it's built in the physical world using robotics and AI. Ready Player One is about a VR game with an immersive multiplayer world experienced through a high-tech headset and haptics hardware. Sword Art Online is about a "full dive" VR system which, like braindances, replaces the body's sensory input, but with a video game world instead of taped real experiences. All of these feature storylines about people who are addicted to the illusion or prefer the virtual world to reality. The Matrix is so remarkably good on this theme that if you're over 30, you've been thinking about Cypher and his steak dinner longer than Gen Alpha has been alive.[4]

One question central to each of those narratives, sometimes explicit and sometimes not, is the role escapism plays for the human. Does it fulfil the character's needs, or does it void their agency?

This is a funny point to try and explain, but fortunately we have some great examples of both. On the positive, constructive side:

• In Star Trek, the holodeck fills the need for variety and stimulation.
• In Cyberpunk, BDs fill many needs like education, forensics, thrillseeking, and sex.
• The Matrix fills all of its characters's psychological needs in a hellish post-apocalypse.[5]
• In Ready Player One, the VR game is an escape from their own imminently pre-apocalyptic dystopia.
• In Sword Art Online, ditto (except instead of escaping the apocalypse, those characters are escaping... comfortable middle-class life in modern Japan. And then they're held hostage inside the game.)
• In Westworld, the park provides thrills and excitement otherwise unavailable to their wealthy and hedonistic clientele, allowing escape from existential ennui.

And the contrary negative cases from the same stories:

• In Star Trek, the holodeck leads to obsession, dependency, and isolation.
• In Cyberpunk, the BD industry leads to an unimaginable demand for snuff, torture, and exploitative recordings.
• The occupants of The Matrix are denied real freedom and self determination and, as a result, lack any true society.
• In Ready Player One, the willful escape from reality is a distraction which prevents society from rebelling against their governments.
• The MMORPG in Sword Art Online holds its players hostage in a lethal "death game", yet some of the players no longer want to return to their old lives at all.
• Westworld's clientele begin to feel that the excitement and narrative of their days in the park are more real than the life they came from. The accessibility of realistic, compliant actor-bodies without real personal needs leads the human characters to dehumanize each other, and ultimately themselves.

It's important to understand this idea: that these stories are both about how we can't get everything we need from fiction, and about the ways that perception is (or can be) better than reality. They're about whether it matters that your physical body is floating in a tank, when your consciousness is subjectively comfortable and eating the most delicious food you can imagine in a nice restaurant. They're about whether life in a joyless world can be made joyful with a good enough simulation.[6]

This is getting more concrete, but it's still abstract because most of us don't actually live in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. How many people in Gaza would log in to Sword Art Online? The number probably isn't zero.

Part 2: Psychochemistry

When you feel good, there's a lot going on inside your brain.[7] The easiest part to explain is the dopamine, because it's a chemical that binds to receptors in your brain that make you feel good[8]. More dopamine means you feel more better, and that's a pretty direct relationship. Maybe you've had the experience of laughing with somebody, and the laughter builds and builds until you're doubled over, spasming and ugly-crying and embarrassed. The feeling recedes, and you regain composure (and probably wipe your face because you're not sure if those are tears or boogers, until you remember that tears don't have lumps.)

The experience you're remembering is a natural example of dopamine release, building in quantity and therefore intensity until you reach a threshold and drop back to normal. There are also longer-lasting effects, because laughter releases a lot of hormones which affect you in more complicated ways, like releasing muscle tension and reducing inflammatory response. But one of the longer-lasting effects is a drip feed of more dopamine, just a little bit for the next hour or so. All dopamine is experienced as a drip-feed, relatively speaking: any given dopamine molecule only lasts for a second or two at most. And a lot of the rewarding sensations come from other hormones which follow the initial release of dopamine.

But we're talking about spikes here. Dopamine levels vary from time to time, and from person to person. If you have less dopamine than you need, you're going to feel unmotivated, tired, and sad. The lower your dopamine is, the worse you feel. And just like positive stimuli cause immediate releases of dopamine, negative stimuli cause equally rapid drops in dopamine release. The drop can actually happen in like a tenth of a second, which is extremely fast.

One of the weirder things about dopamine, though, is that if you have too much of it for long enough, you become resistant to it. You need more dopamine to feel normal, and when your levels drop back to where they started, it feels like everything will suck forever. Weirdly, the reverse doesn't seem to be true: if your dopamine is low for long enough, that's depression, and your brain doesn't compensate by needing less. Which is a bummer.

Part 3: Addiction

All of us are probably addicts. There are the well known ones, like heroin or steroids or gambling, and there are the ones which everyone has a couple of, like food, or caffeine, or shopping. There are also a few that almost everyone secretly doesn't think is a real addiction, like sex or social media addiction.

There are a lot of fascinating things about addiction, and we're going to talk about a few of my favorites here. The first one is how little we can all really agree on what things even are addictive, and what being addicted actually means. There are people who will tell you, straight faced, that if they became addicted to heroin they would simply quit. Most of them are wrong. More than half of all mornings I decide I don't need a cup of coffee, but I end up brewing a pot before lunch anyway almost every time.

Another really interesting thing about addiction is how good it is when it's good. The first quarter of a cup of coffee is anticipation, the middle half is euphoric. The back quarter cup tastes like I have to walk downstairs again. "He's going to compare coffee addiction to a real addiction" you are thinking incredulously. Fortunately, I know better. Heroin is a million billion times better than coffee, I am informed reliably by those who know.

The final interesting thing about addiction is how it interacts with dopamine, on both the ebb and flow. Addictions are so powerful because feeding them releases dopamine, and denying them costs dopamine. When you don't get your fix you feel worse, and the way you feel worse is to become unmotivated, which reduces your interest in quitting the addiction.

In a way, the precise chemical mechanisms of addiction don't really matter, because we'd be susceptible to these kinds of effects even if our reward chemistry was wildly different. If an organism can experience reward, anything able to trigger that reward will feel good, even if it's materially harmful. This is inevitable because there's no way to determine whether some stimulus was really good or bad for the organism except in hindsight, and the experiences of punishment and reward has to be immediate to keep the organism alive.[9]

Part 4: The diminishing returns of novelty

A few minutes ago I asked you to remember laughing so hard that you ugly-cried. I am willing to bet that you've had this experience, but I am also reasonably sure this happens less to you now than it did when you were younger. Some of this is just because Adult Life Is More Work, but there's another reason which I am convinced contributes a huge amount.

We really, really like novelty, and the older we get, the less novel life tends to be. We experience new things more quickly than new things are created. And so, my thesis goes, we also laugh less, because the jokes we laugh at become more routine as our sample size increases. So essential to understanding human enjoyment is this ruthless fact: the more of something we get, the less we enjoy it.

The psychochemical reasons for this are complicated, but a big part of it is our old friend dopamine. When we process an experience your brain figures out how novel it is, and if it's less unique, your brain releases less reward for itself to enjoy. This has some interesting bounds-keeping built into it, by the way: firstly, it ensures that we tend to seek new experiences, which is where our inquisitiveness and tendency to enjoy figuring things out comes from. And secondly, the have-too-much-and-you-need-more-ness of it still applies: if you do nothing but novel things for a while, your dopamine levels get out of whack and normal everyday life feels beige and terrible.

This is why you feel mediocre after getting back from that trip to Europe. It isn't just that you're despondent over how bad our train network is, or how bland and tasteless American supermarket bread is: your brain is literally on a novelty hangover. It's why the enjoyment you get from that 24-pack of Oreo Cones isn't really that much higher than the enjoyment you get from a 6-pack. Even ice cream has diminishing returns.

And this in turn affects our relationship with drugs. It's why if you're really an addict, you keep trying to crank that knob up, up, up higher. You need more of your addiction to get the same amount of dopamine, and you need more dopamine to experience the same amount of reward.

Part 5: Utopia

One of many constants of life on this rock is that we're always sure we could be happier. Politically, there has never been a totally satisfied society of any substantial population, and probably of any population. But this doesn't stop us from imagining something better!

As an exercise, I want you to think about a perfect place to live. It's up to you what this place is like! The politics and social structure can work however you want. But however you get to your Utopia, I expect the following things are true:

• Everyone can get enough to eat.
• Everyone can get access to medical care.
• Everyone has access to productive employment.
• Everyone has access to entertainment.

This, by the way, isn't really some kind of political litmus test. Utopia works the same whether you understand "everyone can get enough to eat" to mean a socialist state that directly provides necessities to its constituents, or a capitalist society where anyone who wants to put in the effort can earn enough to support a comfortable lifestyle. Ditto for the other items in the list.

One way or another, Utopia is a place where everyone's needs are met. A good amount of dopamine most of the time. Thinking about this sort of place, most of us have one or more of these reactions: That sounds so nice, or How would I not get bored?

That second reaction is pretty informative. And in general, our depictions of utopia in fiction tend to depict societies which aren't so great after all: inhabitants experience crippling existential ennui, or the utopia is built on secret slave labor, or ruled by harsh authoritarianism, or whatever. Even in fiction, perfect utopias exist only in memory, remembered in mythological terms from before some cataclysm or exodus. This is because true utopias are a boring place to set a story (where's the conflict?!) and it's difficult not to imagine that life in such a Utopia would in fact be boring.[10]

In other words, your experience of reward depends on novelty, and a lot of what keeps good experiences novel is that in the real world, they don't happen particularly often.

At the most fundamental level, the problem with Utopia is that one of our needs is having unmet needs. And, in the sort of irony which points to a God with a wicked sense of humor, failing to meet that need doesn't count as meeting it.

Part 6: The Emptiness Machine

Around 2022, we figured out how to make really compelling images using an algorithm based on stolen art[11]. The first thing we did with it was sell non-creatives the idea that they can make art without much effort. (And the second thing we did with it was create an industry around using those machines to make porn.)

This has ramifications if you make money from selling art, particularly commission work. Most commission-based art isn't very good – the rule that "80% of everything is crap" might even be generous for art – but that doesn't mean we shouldn't care that the bottom four fifths of human artists selling OC sketches on Fiverr are losing their livelihoods. On the contrary: everybody who makes it to the top 20% had to work their way up from the bottom. Chillingly, the group of human artists today who are better technical artists than AI (and, thus, "deserve to be paid") is as large now as it's ever going to be, and that group is going to dwindle away to nothing over the next couple of years.

But it also has ramifications if you're, I dunno, an organism that enjoys positive stimuli. Because AI art can stimulate you right now, whether you're thinking about illustrating your OC, or a unique image to print on a phone case, or being weird about Mrs. Incredible's butt. And AI can do it right now, at negligible cost, as many times as you want, and that's never going away.

Everything I said about generative visual art is true of written works and video as well. How long until a novel or feature film can be created for you, to your specifications, in under five minutes? How long until your phone can watch your face as you watch the video, and read your reactions well enough to predictively write the ending so it's the exact right amount of Happy Ending, or bittersweet, or sexual wish fulfillment?[12]

The "how long" doesn't really matter, in my opinion. It's going to happen soon, and whenever it happens, it's going to be that way forever. The people alive now are the last humans who will know what it feels like to want something they can't have.[13]

Part 7: Actually, it's all just chemistry

In Part 2 of this essay, we discussed the mechanics of dopamine resistance, the way your brain adjusts to need an elevated amount of reward to feel normal. Elsewhere we talked about how we obtain these rewards, and the diminishing returns there. And we've touched on the personal nature of reward-seeking.

On a base level, what your brain wants is that reward. Caring about what causes that reward is a function of long term planning and evaluation, and this sort of thinking (which we generally call "delayed gratification") is a symptom of intelligence. You have to know that accepting lower reward now will result in a better reward later, and tie that in to making decisions that lead to a less immediate payout.

This is why rejecting heroin is so hard: the reward offered is just impossible to obtain any other way, over any timescale. You can't earn up a million billion dollars a dollar at a time if you're dealing with a human lifespan, so you need to experience the reverse – that million billion dollars of debt, where the heroin has worn off and it's torture just to be alive, and no amount of natural reward could feel okay. Where banging a supermodel on a warm Spanish beach while eating tiramisu would feel like torture by comparison to the high. Only understanding the lows, and that the highs diminish every time even for perfect bliss, can create the context necessary for quitting to be a rational decision.[14]

We have machines in our pockets right now which can create any picture we want. Soon, they'll be able to create any media we could desire, of any length and type, which can be as much or as little to our taste as we want. And soon, this font of unbridled creation will metastasize throughout society. We will[15] hook the generative technologies up to CNC routers and 3D printers and robotic cooking apparatuses, and you'll be able to get any thing you want as quickly as you can put that desire into words so long as you can afford a subscription to whatever hell-service is artisanally spooning soft-serve into your mouth.

And in the end, if you have a button you can press that makes you happy, why would you ever not press it? What would pressing it have to cost to stop you?

People who have recovered from heroin addiction describe perfect bliss, but they also describe a great and terrible hollowness. You have to outrun the hollowness by feeding it more heroin, and feeding the hollowness causes it to grow. As long as you can do more each time you'll feel like you're winning, but eventually you run out or die.[16]

All reward follows this pattern.[17] The only thing that's special about heroin is that it's the most reward available, but generative technology brings that addictive why-would-you-not quality to anything and everything we can imagine. Maybe there isn't as much dopamine as there is in heroin, but it's all around you, it's legal, and it's practically free.

The day is coming soon when every moment is one million billion Renaissances. And when that day comes, the only ones who are not addicts will be the dead.

Footnotes