The structure of the problem is not man vs machine. It is actually a market-driven process that concentrates society's top cognitive talent on the engineering problem of how to best undermine an individual's agency. It's not a fair fight. We've all been taught that we're sovereign individuals gifted with full agency and capable of choosing what's best for ourselves at any given moment. But this doesn't describe the world as it actually exists.

I think his solutions and predictions are off base. They're all about communities finding ways to limit the use of technology. But it's not clear that technology is making us unhappy. I mean, that's what's happening, but it's hard to prove it, and it doesn't feel that way. We love our devices, and hate the world.

Here's how I see it playing out. First, suicide acceptance. I was watching that Cheer documentary, and there's a bit where someone says, "If you don't like it, there's the door." It occurred to me, nobody says that about life. There's a door, but we don't talk about it, and trying to go through it is illegal. So I expect the dominant culture to have stronger anti-suicide messages, while underground movements become bolder in supporting suicide for even healthy young people.

By the way, my argument against suicide is that the people who want to kill themselves are the same people who intuitively sense how much better life could be, and they're the ones we need the most.

Second, the continuing growth of tribalism, which I define as identification with a group, where the group identity is based on conflict with some other group. It's like a correction against systems that do a bad job of providing meaning, because ingroup-outgroup violence is a source of meaning that's strong and simple and always waiting under the surface.

Third, even deeper immersion in technology, and I'm not necessarily against it. I frame it like this: Nature, good; human-made physical world, bad; human-made imaginary worlds, good. The problem is, who's going to do the grunt work if we're all gaming? In the best-case scenario, we learn things from imaginary worlds that show us how to make the physical world better.

What's probably really going to happen, is that today's radical threat becomes tomorrow's new normal. We'll just get used to the burden that pocket computers put on mental health, and in another 20 years, we'll all be talking about the threat of biotech.

It already is. In fact, there are a number of cases I have seen in which "autism" has been used in place of "we don't know what the fuck to call this, but we need to give it a label so this person can get SSDI". Now that I'm active in prehospital emergency medicine, the takeaway is that if the term "autistic" is used in the initial dispatch, be prepared for fucking anything.

He also says that aspies prefer the company of neurotypicals to other aspies, but that's not the whole story, because in this TEDx talk about autism, around the ten minute mark, Jac den Houting mentions the theory that autistic and non-autistic people communicate better among themselves than with each other, and this was confirmed by a study using the telephone game with three groups: "The all-autistic and all-neurotypical groups were equally accurate in their information sharing, but the combined autistic and neurotypical group was significantly less accurate."

I also want to say, I haven't been diagnosed with anything, and I don't want to be, until such diagnosis can get me benefits like free therapy or better drugs. And I understand the danger of making my limitations part of my identity, because then the ego doesn't want to get better. There are stories about people going from being really bad at something to really good. I've actually been practicing walking around the apartment doing complex moves without bumping into anything, and what happens is, when I'm trying to do something tricky with my right foot, my left foot hits something. So I need to work on being aware of more than one body part at the same time.

That's something I'm already doing when I practice swimming or playing piano. By the way, I finally figured out how to get midi files from my keyboard to my computer, and convert them to mp3. So if you're curious, here's an mp3 file of an 80 second bit I did a few months ago. It's more rudimentary than it sounds. My usual method is to keep eight fingers fixed on the same four notes, an octave apart, and then just jam on those notes. My biggest influence is Steve Reich's Piano Phase, and I love to phase the rhythm between my left and right hands.