AI, Money, Human Nature and the Problem with Problems

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How we define “problems” also defines what we “understand” as a “solution,” and if our definition is circular, it’s delusional.

Readers kindly point out I don’t understand either AI or human nature. I readily confess to having an imperfect understanding of AI and human nature, along with everything else.

One thing I do understand is that “understanding” exists within the confines of an implicit milieu that is typically assumed by those embedded in it to be “the way it is,” i.e. objective reality when in fact it is a cultural-conceptual mental construct with boundary conditions those operating inside this construct do not see because they’re confident that their “understanding” is 1) complete and 2) accurate.

Due to the nature of all cultural-conceptual mental constructs, these assumptions are false. To those embedded in a particular cultural-conceptual mental construct, this construct is “reality” in the same way that mice living in Mouse Utopia (a large cage with abundant food and other mice) “understand” this artificial world is “real” and their “understanding” that this is “real” is 1) complete and 2) accurate.

What the readers kindly pointing out my deficiencies of “understanding” aren’t stating is the cultural-conceptual context that they view as “the real world” is actually a mental construct. The current era’s cultural-conceptual context is a remarkably narrow, remarkably distorted “understanding” of human experience based on two implicit mental constructs:

1. Human nature boils down to behavioral constructs: stimulus-response, avoidance of pain, the seeking of pleasure and leisure, which boil down to dopamine cascades, and so on.

2. All problems are ultimately technical / financial problems that can be solved with technology and “money.”

And since AI is a technology that leverages all knowledge and all previous technologies, it is the ultimate technology-can-solve-everything technology. This construct is reassuringly circular: by defining all problems as being solvable by technology, then all we need to do to solve all problems is increase the power and reach of technology. The conclusion is “obvious”: all problems created by technology can be solved by creating more technology.

Once again, this construct is reassuringly circular: since technology solves all problems, problems created by technology can be solved by more technology.

The same can be said of the financial system, a.k.a. “money.” Since “money” can buy everything in the tangible world, it has a special kind of magic which blends perfectly with the magic of technology. And “money” has a magical component, credit, which enables the creation of “money” via the mechanism of using income or assets as the real-world foundation of this new “money.”

Put these constructs together and voila, Nirvana-Utopia comes into sharp focus: robots and AI will solve all our problems and do all the work so we’ll have the limitless leisure to amuse ourselves by staring at screens that unleash dopamine cascades or jet around the world (consuming nearly-free energy) racking up leisure-world experiences, with all this super-abundance funded by “money.”

To those who “understand” everything within a construct whose boundary conditions they don’t see, the possibility that their “understanding” is delusional cannot possibly be true. Isn’t it “obvious’ that humans love leisure and novelty, that “money” is all we need to buy limitless quantities of leisure and novelty via financial transactions enabled by technology, which will also provide all the energy, resources, manufacturing, transport, etc. needed to keep Nirvana-Utopia at our fingertips?

The possibility that the truly critical problems are beyond the reach of technology–or that technology itself is one of the problems–are anathema to the reductionist behavioral-technological mindset, which is trapped in a delusional construct in which there must be a technological / financial solution, so let’s identify it.

In this construct, erecting thousands of giant machines to sequester carbon is the solution to climate change. OK, solved that, next problem. The solution to ground-based traffic congestion is thousands of electric-powered aircraft that will flit around, transporting us here and there, all controlled by the loving grace of infallible AI.

And when all this purposeless, dopamine-exhaustion, transactional Ultra-Processed Life makes you sad, lonely and depressed, here’s a chatbot that is a “friend” and “therapist” combined to “solve” your mental health “problems.” For in this financial-technological cultural-conceptual context, everything can be optimized by technology, for problem-solving is fundamentally a process of optimizing human nature via optimizing technology and “money”: stimulus-response, pain-pleasure, dopamine receptors firing, problem solved.

And when all this purposeless, transactional Ultra-Processed Life makes you ill, AI will conjure up countless new pharmaceuticals you can wolf down as the “solution” to the “problem” of your ill health, neatly avoiding the real problem which is purposeless, transactional Ultra-Processed Life is inherently unhealthy and deranging.

My “understanding” of technology and “money” is a bit different from this conventional techno-financial construct which I view as a modern mythology of Progress). I “understand” technology as the manifestation of humanity as a tool-making species. Tools and “money” (with money understood as a tool with both tangible and imaginary/conceptual value) offer us wide-ranging utility value.

I also “understand” both tools have boundary conditions that define and limit their utility. These tools are not infinite or infinitely malleable; they only function within specific boundaries. Beyond these boundaries, they fail, or fail to provide utility, or they become a “problem” as they consume resources and lead us away from conceptualizing “problems” in ways that enable “solutions” beyond the narrow confines of technology-finance’s boundaries.

Trapped inside the confines of technology-financial “solutions,” we’re caught in a doom-loop of doing more of what’s failed due to our inability to “understand” that we’re blind to the construct we accept as “the way it is” and its boundary conditions.

In the Mouse Utopia construct of finance, the “solution” is to turn everything into a market, unleashing the magic of market forces which solves all problems by turning everything into a commodity orbiting supply, demand and “money.”

One of the boundary conditions of markets is that once everything’s been reduced to a “market,” it can be manipulated to the benefit of those proclaiming a “free market” that they control. The door labeled “free market solves everything” leads to “some are more equal than others” depending on who controls the “money” and supply-demand.

It doesn’t matter what form of “money” is being circulated. what matters is how it’s distributed by the boundary conditions, i.e. the rules governing the initial creation and distribution of the “money”, the taxation rules and the rules enabling control of transactions, supply-demand and what’s visible to all (i.e. transparent) and what’s hidden to maintain advantages invisible to the mice scurrying around Utopia.

Humanity isn’t just a tool-making species; it is also a social species, as our embedded social coding is what enables the knowledge of tool-making to be conserved and distributed.

Our social nature is as complex as our minds, our bodies and the world we inhabit. The narrow, reductionist, behavioral-technological construct that’s taken as “the way it is” views the Universe as a mechanism with inputs, outputs and processes that can be duplicated and controlled once the instructions / coding are revealed.

The boundary conditions of this construct are absurdly narrow. For example, our “understanding” of the human organism is comically reductionist. Sugary cereals are considered “healthy” if they’ve been fortified with a handful of vitamins. Meanwhile, outside this comically narrow “understanding” of food and human health, every real food (for example, garlic) contains hundreds of compounds which interact with hundreds of compounds in other unadulterated foods and the thousands of types of micro-organisms in our digestive tract microbiome.

The constructs of “money” and technology–including AI–are equally reductive and equally blind to their own limited “understanding” of what they claim to understand.

Human life does not distill down to dopamine cascades and behavioral if-then coding. Our hard-wiring has been selected to conserve what is most advantageous to our survival, and these traits are largely social in nature, as our social skills are our primary selective advantage.

We seek connection with others, avenues of self-expression that serve our need to have purpose and meaning through being useful to others and mastering the means of being useful to others. We seek to be part of something larger than ourselves and our attraction to dopamine hits.

The reductive, mechanistic, behavioral-techno-financial optimization mental construct is blind to the boundary conditions that limit the utility-value of this extremely limited model of “how the world works.” This construct replaces complex relationships and their inter-connections with discrete transactions that can then be optimized as if-then constructs. All of human life and experience is distilled down to financial or technologically mediated transactions.

For example, dynamic pricing, where data on each “consumer” is collected and analyzed to identify factors such as income, impulse control, patterns of spending, etc., that enable the AI pricing tool to jack up the price of the item/service anticipating that the “consumer” has both the income/credit and willingness to spend more than “consumers” with less disposable income/credit.

To those whose belief structures align with the behavioral-techno-financial optimization mental construct, this optimization is itself optimal in terms of delivering dopamine-cascade Nirvana-Utopia. Since transacting every material essential of life in a bloodless, relationship-free exchange of “money” increases our leisure time to trigger dopamine cascades by staring at screens, we’re “happy.”

The possibility that the dopamine-cascade Nirvana-Utopia of AI-powered transactional Ultra-Processed Life is a poor match for human nature doesn’t occur to them because that would force an examination of all the boundary conditions limitations of the cultural-conceptual construct they incorrectly assume is “the way it is” when in fact it’s all a cripplingly reductionist mental construct that’s completely untethered from a comprehensive understanding of human nature and our experience of the world around us.

The data showing that this AI-enabled dopamine-cascade Nirvana-Utopia is in reality a living Hell does not compute in their belief structure in this mental construct. If this artificial, synthetic, ultra-processed, transactional, delusional, fake world makes us ill and deranged, the “solution” is more technology and more “money.”

This is the self-liquidating circularity end-game of the entire delusional behavioral-techno-financial optimization mental construct.

The idea that the truly existential problems can’t be solved by “money” or technology doesn’t compute in their mental construct, which is based on their belief in the limitless power of “money” and technology to solve every problem that could possibly exist–a belief that is circular because it has no “understanding” of the boundary conditions of this construct.

To offer up one example of many, the believers in the behavioral-techno-financial optimization mental construct do not “see” moral decay as a causal factor because the moral universe doesn’t exist in their model, just as the complex workings and value of real food, real relationships, real meaning, real purpose, real-world mastery of real-world skills don’t exist except as ultra-processed tokens that can be distilled down to if-then optimizations of transactions.

I “understand” the appeal of this belief structure in the behavioral-techno-financial optimization mental construct of dopamine-cascade Nirvana-Utopia –it’s simplistic and offers the implicit promise of god-like powers to the believers, and who doesn’t want god-like powers, as those are the ultimate ultra-optimized triggers of the dopamine-cascades of self-reinforcing delusion.

Here’s the problem with problems:

If we believe AI will provide a “solution” to the “problem” of moral decay, I submit this is delusion without any self-awareness of its delusional construct or the circularity of that construct. How we define “problems” also defines what we “understand” as a “solution,” and if our definition is circular, it’s delusional: all problems are technological-financial in nature, so “money” and technology can solve all problems.

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Source: http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2026/04/ai-money-human-nature-and-problem-with.html