The world is changing fast. So fast that it makes us see through a lens of insanity.
How does rapid change drive us nuts? In 1905, a six-year-old boy in Norway had a revelatory experience. Summers were hot in Oslo, his hometown. To keep her son happy, his mom rented a farmhouse fifteen miles outside the city for the summer. The farm house came complete with a yard full of chickens. And Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe, the six-year-old, became chicken-obsessed.
First he taught himself to recognize every bird. To help himself out, he gave all the chickens names. And he started a notebook. Then he noticed patterns.
Chicken number one was first at the food trough. All the other chickens made way for her. That haughty hen had another privilege: she was allowed to peck at any of her fellow chickens. Yes, any and all.
The next chicken to eat at the trough was also privileged. She got to peck at any other chicken she wanted. With the exception of chicken number one.
Chicken number three was the third to eat at the trough. She got more limited privileges. She could peck any chicken she wanted with the exception of chicken number one and chicken number two.
The six year old boy added to his notebooks summer after summer for seventeen years. Then he wrote his university thesis on the topic. He called what he had discovered a “dominance hierarchy” and a “pecking order.”
To him, this system seemed tyrannical. But it accomplished something crucial. Every chicken knew her place. The result was peace.
Peace, that is, until you threw a strange chicken into the yard, an unknown chicken. Then all heck broke lose. The chickens went nuts.
Why? None of the home chickens knew where they stood anymore. And no one wanted to be shoved further down the pecking order to make room for the newcomer. In fact, some treated the chaos as a chance to move up.
That’s what’s happening in the world right now. America, the country we love, is losing its top-chicken-at-the-trough position, its position of global leadership. China is slowly but surely inching its way into the top spot.
What’s more, in 2022, OpenAI made ChatGPT available to the public. The result was an AI explosion. Journalists discovered that if you could find a negative story and you could put the word AI in the title, it would attract a flood of hits.
In the first year the big negative AI story was of a bot who told a New York Times reporter that she loved him, and tried to convince him that he did not really love his wife.
The second year the big negative AI story was that you were about to be fired and replaced by AI.
In the last few days the big story has been that ex-Anthropic employees warn that artificial intelligence is likely to kill off every human on the planet in the next four years. And on top of all that, we have the daily uncertainties of the Iran War.
New chickens are being tossed into our barnyard nearly every week. No wonder we are going nuts.
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About the author: Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. Bloom’s new book is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong. Says Harvard’s Ellen Langer of The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, Bloom “argues that we are not savaging the earth as some would have it, but instead are growing the cosmos. A fascinating read.” One of Bloom’s eight previous books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. Not to mention in scientific journals like Biosystems, New Ideas in Psychology, and PhysicaPlus. Says Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment. I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.” For more, see http://howardbloom.net or http://howardbloom.institute
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