I finished reading Tripping on Utopia, by Benjamin Breen on Margaret Mead, The Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science. It was a good book that was easy to finish. The book filled in my “civilization map” during the period between 1930 and 1970, and connected some interesting dots between the cybernetics world of the 1950s, the Macy Conferences that gave birth to the world of compute and artificial intelligence shaping our world today.
Tripping on Utopia widens the MKULTRA project out of the CIA, where they unleashed LSD on the world, demonstrating how mainstream psychiatry and early pharmaceutical work in a looser era helped set in motion the counter culture movement, but also artificial intelligence, and the Internet. The overlap between the Macy Conferences, psychedelics, and cybernetics has my head spinning. It is something that has definitely shaped my view of technology, as well as the wider state of the Internet.
The book only lightly overlaps on the concept of cybernetics, which I am very interested in lately because it was the birthplace of compute, artificial intelligence, and the Internet, but also because I feel like it is where we disconnected the human from technology in a way that allowed capitalism to produce technology startups and the tech oligarchy we are experiencing today. The birth of technological scale and the ability to treat human beings as simply users in a system came from the troubled brith of psychedelic science and the irresponsible behavior of scientists, the media, and government agencies after World War II.
A lot of attention is spent during discussions around the Internet and how it was funded by the military, but I think these discussions do not go deep enough into the role that the CIA played in this funding mechanisms. Also I think the mind expanding studies discussed in this book set the table for a lot of ur delusions around what the human mind is, which allowed for the foundations of artificial intelligence to be laid. In short, things got baked into the foundation of the discipline of AI, cognitive science, and neural networks that were well, half baked and pretty delusional—resulting in a lot of the beliefs around what AI can do today.
Like our food supply, and other areas of our economy, the Internet and world of compute is still being powered from the outputs of World War II. You can see that we are still struggling with psychedelic science and the repercussions of regulation from this time period. I am still working towards a satisfactory understanding regarding how Margaret Mead and other more human centered scientific disciplines were pushed away from the cybernetics shift towards artificial intelligence, cognitive sciences, and other areas that have laid the foundation of today’s AI evolution. While Tripping on Utopia didn’t provide me with the answers I was looking for it did fill in the map a little bit more on what was going on in the early days of compute that prioritized corporate and military interests over those of human beings.
