Becoming our unconscious ⊗ Energy and the matter problem

AI is not conscious, but it is becoming our unconscious

In this fascinating piece L.M. Sacasas contrasts two positions on automation, consciousness, and thinking. For Alfred North Whitehead, civilisation progresses by automating thought so it no longer requires conscious reflection. For Hannah Arendt, our charge is to “think what we are doing.” The two claims “rhyme antagonistically,” yet no real argument runs between them, since she wasn’t answering Whitehead. Sacasas draws a line between two kinds of automation, one is the skill built through repetition, like an athlete’s drills, that frees a person to perform at a higher level. The other is cognitive labour handed to a machine, which never gets done by a human mind at all. He wonders if there is a threshold where Whitehead’s formula reverses, a point where automating more of our thinking makes for a worse civilisation? AI adoption may be where we find out.

He then looks, in a couple of ways, at AI understood by analogy to the unconscious. In one, agentic AI builds a layer of activity in the world that operates apart from human judgement—a point he borrows from Erik Hoel, who warns that it moves the operations of civilisation out from under the supervision of consciousness. In the other, more speculative angle, Sacasas turns to Marshall McLuhan’s account of electric media as an extension of the nervous system and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of a collective noosphere. Both lead to Gregory Ulmer’s description of the internet as a “prosthesis of our collective unconscious,” which he thought might let us examine our own cultural formation. Sacasas argues chatbots do the opposite, they smooth over that tangle with confident, soothing answers and function less like a guide to self-knowledge than like an anti-therapist. He closes by wondering whether some of the anxiety and instability running through public life now traces back to that retreat of consciousness, as an artificial unconscious reasserts itself beneath our collective existence.

I tend to assume that a large portion of society has some level of anxiety about the world. Some know, in the sense that the information has made its way to their brain, but ignore it as a self-preservation mechanism. Some just don’t have the processing or attention power left, after dealing with their lives. We often say that most of us—in the global north at least—don’t think about things and take them for granted. For example, a piece of meat in the grocery store does not represent an animal, just an ingredient. Electricity and water are “just there.”

I’m left wondering if instead of “we just don’t think about things” as if it’s because we don’t have the time, it’s instead that we don’t think about them because we don’t understand them anymore. Everything is part of a large system, every system is entangled with others, and many of which are purposefully obfuscated. Beyond that reflection in terms of agency and taking actions in our collective best interests instead of just going along, I’m wondering if this anxiety, this dread, comes from all this obfuscation. That we are not, or not only, ignoring things because we are habituated, but also because they are largely beyond our understanding.

Actions that are impenetrable to language and thus to conscious thought can also be explained by reference to the unconscious. I am not one to instinctively appeal to the language of the unconscious, but it may be a useful analogy in the service of understanding our relation, individually and collectively, to the artificially intelligent apparatus that is increasingly mediating our experience of the world. […]

the AI revolution is a mechanism for transferring the processes of our civilization from under the supervision of consciousness to unconsciousness. But as AI removes consciousness from the workings of the world, it renders the world increasingly uninterpretable, ever more strange and unintelligible. […]

Our nervous system has been supplemented with a digitized memory of gigantic proportions. And it is this digitized memory which has been instrumental in feeding the Large Language Models that are now nearly synonymous with artificial intelligence. […]

The internet is vast web of the cultural artifacts, symbols, images, texts, and diverse ephemera that have shaped us throughout our lifetimes, linked not by a linear logic but by an almost dreamlike logic of association, not unlike the human unconscious in psychoanalytic theory. […]

The insertion of an ordinary language interface between ourselves and the digitized collective unconscious makes it more obscure and inscrutable to us.

Energy and the matter problem

Deb Chachra, writing in Future Observatory Journal, opens with a quick history lesson: in 1856, aluminium was rare enough to be a royal gift, more precious than gold. The metal is abundant in the earth’s crust but nearly impossible to isolate, and it took until 1886 for the Hall–Héroult process to crack it—a method so energy-intensive that aluminium is still sometimes called “solid energy.” What changed wasn’t the chemistry, it was access to cheap power: the Hoover Dam, wartime aluminium plants, decades of expanding supply chains. Once energy got cheap enough, aluminium went from princely gift to disposable can. Chachra treats this as a template for the renewable transition and a warning at the same time. Cheap, abundant energy makes new industrial processes viable, including recycling processes that made no economic sense before—aluminium, steel and glass are all recycled today because doing so costs far less energy than making them from raw material. But the last time humanity got access to abundant cheap energy, from fossil fuels, it went mostly toward extracting and producing more, not toward closing loops.

The essay’s real argument is that “climate change” or “the environment” collapse two separate problems. The energy problem, where power comes from, is now technically solved; the sun alone delivers far more energy than humanity could use. The matter problem is different: atoms don’t disappear, they just end up somewhere inconvenient, as carbon dioxide in the air or microplastics in the ocean. Combustion has always tied these two problems together, since getting energy meant moving carbon into the atmosphere. Renewables break that link, and Chachra argues the real prize isn’t lower emissions but the option to close material loops entirely, plastics included. Most plastics were built to be sellable, not recyclable, and can only be reclaimed by breaking them down to their base molecules—a process that costs more energy than starting from oil, as long as that energy comes from fossil fuels. Cheap renewable electricity removes that constraint. Companies like Twelve are already running pilot plants that turn atmospheric carbon dioxide and water into polymers and fuels, essentially the same chemistry a plant uses to build cellulose. Swinging back to the previous paragraph: solving the energy problem only matters if that energy goes toward recovering matter rather than mining more of it.

I’ve gotten pushback recently when mentioning “abundant energy.” Some of the details are in Deb’s piece, but I still think it’s important to differentiate between solar energy that hits the planet (abundant), other renewables (also abundant but more unevenly distributed), technologies to capture that energy (solar panels are incredibly cheaper than even 5 years ago, see some examples below the quotes), and actually getting that energy to homes/industries (a lot more complex). Saying “we now have access to abundant renewable electricity that lets us potentially do things we couldn’t before” (Deb’s piece) and “we are having trouble meeting demand, the grid is insufficient, we need massive investments” are both true at the same time. The “trick” or rather the shift in perspective, is to understand both. We have problems and opportunities when it comes to collecting/producing energy and using it in novel ways.

Every moment of every day, the incident solar energy reaching Earth dwarfs humanity’s total use. We now have the potential to build out a world where all the energy we use is not just clean, but also both cheap and abundant. […]

What we usually call ‘pollution’ is a shorthand way of saying that specific configurations of atoms are now someplace inconvenient or dangerous, whether it’s carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, microplastics in the ocean, forever chemicals (PFAS) in water supplies or even E. coli in sewage outfalls. This is the matter problem. […]

This is the technology that solves the previously intractable problem of closing the loop on existing plastics: we can recycle them chemically, by pulling them apart and putting them back together again. And it demonstrates how we can begin to think about reusing all the atoms that we use, not just the ones that are easy or convenient to recycle. […]

We can envision a world where everything that we’ve ever pulled out of the ground – every carbon atom, every aluminium, gold and lithium atom – gets endlessly reused in useful ways, where the only input is clean energy. If we build out this world – a world where everyone has all the energy they need, and we use that energy to mitigate pollution – we’ll solve climate change as a side effect.

§ Solar abundance, some examples of where solar is at right now. Spain’s solar is so cheap investors are looking for an exit (archive.ph). ⊗ Many Australians can get three free hours of power from today. ⊗ Spain’s renewables revolution is paying off: Electricity bills are lower despite energy crisis. ⊗ The solarisation of Pakistan’s energy economy.

§ Matter Battle (archived version). The “matter problem” from Deb’s piece reminded me of this project by another favourite friendly reader of Sentiers, Bryan Boyer. “A Matter Battle is the conflict between human intentions and the laws and behaviors of the physical universe. One enters a Matter Battle when there is an attempt to execute the desires of the mind in any medium of physical matter. Any act of construction (such as building a building) is a good example of a Matter Battle. To lesser degrees, reaching for something on a high shelf, baking a pie, and drawing a line also qualify as Matter Battles. Material acts that are without intention or where intention is purposefully exploratory, such as drip painting, are not Matter Battles.”

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• Another ___ is Possible: A Glossary for Other Worlds. “A glossary of 15 terms, each with a writeup that expands on what each term means, looks like, and can be. A not-so-secret 16th entry, ‘lostalgia’, forms the foreword by articulating our starting point: that old ideas of the future continue to have a strong grip on the present, making it difficult to imagine otherwise.”
• Did any sci-fi get AI “right”? Haven’t read fully yet because I want to click through the books, but looks like a good list. “Science fiction that anticipated LLMs and actually existing AI; whether or not young people are actually embracing a more analog existence; what the “next grift” after AI will be; my favorite video games, and more!”
• FUTURE OF US. “As the country turns 250, the city of San Francisco will turn into a weeklong celebration of community-sourced visions of the futures we actually want.” (Bit late if you wanted to go, but names and orgs to look into, and I’m sure they’ll publish some stuff after the event.)

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• Scarcity is driving AI innovation outside Silicon Valley. “The projects all share the starting assumption that compute access, power, land, and chip supply are first-order design problems rather than externalities. That assumption produces different infrastructure.”
• Bosses are becoming obsessed with AI, using it to make every decision, barraging their employees with nonsensical ChatGPT directives, and even asking it who to fire. “Soon her boss started ‘making structural company decisions based solely on his conversations with ChatGPT,’ the attorney recalled — including asking the bot who to hire and fire. The boss had ‘clearly developed some sort of mental disorder,’ she said. ‘Spending the whole day talking to ChatGPT and making decisions about the future of your company and the people who work there based on what it ‘tells’ you seems insane.’”
• What it means to be a mathematician when AI does the math. “Speakers described a future in which superhuman AI mathematicians transcend human knowledge and capabilities: forming conjectures, searching solution spaces, proving conjectures, and finally verifying the proofs and generalizing the results, all without human involvement. If this future comes to pass, Yang-Hui He of the London Institute for Mathematical Sciences memorably declared, human mathematicians could become ‘priests to oracles.’”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• “Chock full of incredible animals”: marine expedition uncovers 31 new species in two weeks. “Setting out from Salvador, Bahia, their focus was on the ocean midwater – the area between the seafloor and the sunlit layer closer to the surface. The researchers said this was the largest habitat on Earth, encompassing 90% of the living space on our planet, and also one of the least explored.”
• London reaches 3,000 zero-emission buses in push for clean fleet. “A 100-fold increase since 2016 and equivalent to around a third of its total bus fleet. The overwhelming majority of this 3,000 units are battery-electric buses, with a small number of hydrogen buses also in operation.”
• The Port of Klaipėda has commissioned “the world’s first waste collection vessel to run on green hydrogen and electricity. The ship is built to collect ship-generated waste, bilge water and sludge from vessels calling at Klaipėda port.”

Asides

• Big Think’s 5 favorite nonfiction books of 2026 (so far). “Books to expand your perspective on history, philosophy, space exploration, and more this year.”
• Engineered hookworms could one day dispense drugs from inside your gut. “Using CRISPR-based gene editing, scientists have engineered hookworms that live in the human gut to make an antibody against a deadly toxin, researchers report June 3 in Nature Communications. Eventually, small numbers of hookworms may secrete drugs or other substances into people’s bloodstreams to treat a wide variety of diseases from allergies to obesity.”
• For the first time, a cell built from scratch grows and divides. “Scientists built a synthetic cell that combines more lifelike properties than ever before — proof of concept that it’s possible to bring nonliving materials to life, or something close to it, in the lab.”