Dr. Sherry Turkle, MIT

“Friction is the nature of the human condition.”

    

The Sherry Turkle quote above is from Kara Swisher's wonderful CNN "Live Forever" docuseries (S1.E3). The main topic concerns "loneliness in the age of AI."

 

Yeah, friction, more broadly, is the inescapable condition of life writ large.

 

"EQUILIBRIUM IS DEATH"

A long time ago, here, there, and everywhere else, everything was all together and unreasonably hot. One day, a very, very long time from now, everything will be very, very far apart, and incredibly cold, and nothing will ever happen again. But between those two intervals—on the descent from the Big Bang to the end of time—things can happen. We live in that liminal moment, after the cream has been added to the cosmic coffee, when galaxies convect, the larger swirls begetting smaller swirls, and fractals thread themselves all the way down through creation. But just as the tiny hurricanes of cream in your coffee don’t swirl endlessly over the course of breakfast, this filigree of physical reality—the galaxies, the stars, the planets, the cellular machinery of life—is temporary. It’s endlessly dissipating. In fact, it all exists in the service of getting us as quickly and efficiently as possible to that uniform, universal café au lait at the end of time. Toward tranquility, equilibrium. 

While equilibrium might seem desirable in our own lives, in practice equilibrium is the end. Equilibrium is death. But though the universe as a whole might be straining toward that ultimate end—toward an exhausted state of uniformity and maximal disorder, when everything everywhere is the same temperature, when all debts have been settled, all contradictions have been resolved, and no more work can ever be done again—we still, thankfully, find ourselves far from that final state of equilibrium. The sun still shines, and so we make hay. In fact, we can only ever find ourselves in this brief moment, impossibly early in cosmological history when the universe is still so outrageously far from reaching equilibrium that interesting things can still happen. Life, love, everything we care about—these are all so-called far-from-equilibrium phenomena. And it was in this universal straining toward equilibrium, on a restless young planet, that life emerged. It was here that carbon dioxide was transformed to living matter, and the Earth became the Earth…

Brannen, Peter. The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything: How Carbon Dioxide Made Our World (pp. 20-21). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

Yeah, that's pretty tangential. True nonetheless. writ large...

 

I've cited Dr. Turkle before.

"FRICTION?" 

 

UPDATE

 

I notice increasing CNN YouTube short vids pumping Kara's dpcuseries. e.g.,

 

 

This shortie goes to the S1.E3 topic—"mitigating loneliness w/out chatbots."

More shortly...