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We Never Know What Anything Means

2025-10-17 · letter vlog · Hank, a guest · 6:50 · watch on YouTube

Topic: History & curiosities (also: Projects, Internet & YouTube) · mode: Personal essay · tags: self promotion

Using a new Complexly series, Endlings, whose first episode shows that the telegraph helped drive the passenger pigeon extinct, Hank argues that we never know what anything means: stories about the future fail beyond a short horizon, AI's biggest effects are as unforeseeable as the telegraph's were, and the future just grows in ways nobody intends.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — We never know what anything means: stories about the future fail over long spans (America Online)

  • ★★★ Hank says we never know what anything means: humans imagine the future by extending stories from the past, which works for a while but fails once many people and much time are involved. — 00:00:03
  • ★★ Hank's example: anyone who 30 years ago told a story starting with America Online rolling out to millions of American homes would not have extended it to what actually happened. — 00:00:20 · United States

00:00:29 — Complexly's new series Endlings on the Bizarre Beasts channel

  • ★★ Hank announces Complexly's new show Endlings on the Bizarre Beasts channel, a series about the last surviving members of species meant to teach ecology, biology and humans' relationship with the world. — 00:00:31 · Complexly, Bizarre Beasts

00:00:58 — Martha and the passenger pigeon: the telegraph's unforeseen role in the extinction

  • ★ Hank says the first Endlings video, centered on Martha, the final passenger pigeon, is very good. — 00:00:58
  • ★★★ Hank learned from the episode that passenger pigeons could not have gone extinct without the telegraph. — 00:01:03
  • ★★ Hank explains that the vast pigeon flocks roosted fairly at random depending on the trees, so locals only occasionally got to hunt them and never took all the birds. — 00:01:15
  • ★★★ Once the telegraph spread across the eastern US, people sent word of where the birds were and hunted them en masse; with canning and rail reaching distant markets, this did the passenger pigeon in. — 00:01:41 · United States

  • ★★★ Hank says nobody who created the telegraph imagined its effect on passenger pigeons; their ideas about how it would change the world were short-term, and the bird question was an idea not being had. — 00:02:05

    “They were ideas that were not being had.”

00:02:34 — AI: credible near-term effects, unknowable long-term ones, Hank's worry about trust and recommendation algorithms

  • ★★★ Hank says stories of AI extending life infinitely or causing human extinction do not matter; only thoughts about the next five years are somewhat credible. — 00:02:34
  • ★★ Hank says AI is going to be economically weird and is probably a bubble. (hedged) — 00:02:50
  • ★★★ Hank says AI will be bad for apprenticeship: entry-level jobs for people leaving school are now done by computers, and companies will try them out to save money whether or not they are good at it. — 00:02:55
  • ★★★ Hank thinks AI's most impactful effects will be things nobody has any idea of now: beyond five years everything is up in the air, and beyond ten the dominant forces will be unthought of. — 00:03:10
  • ★★★ Hank says that, like the telegraph, AI will be a very big deal with impacts much weirder than we think. — 00:03:33
  • ★★★ Admitting his bias, Hank says we need to worry whether AI will continue us down the path of losing trust in each other and faith in humanity. — 00:03:40
  • ★★★ Hank says the recommendation algorithms of YouTube, TikTok, Threads and Twitter already erode trust without wanting to: told to keep people on websites, they made us hate each other more, fraying society. — 00:03:50 · recommender system, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter

00:04:02 — The telegraph's other effects, and the future that just grows; sign-off

  • ★ Hank notes that this is him focusing on the negative, one of the biases all people have. — 00:04:30
  • ★★★ Hank says the telegraph also awakened global awareness, extended our circle of care, required the first digital encoding system, and may have helped create the very idea of humanity. — 00:04:35 · empathy

  • ★★★ Hank's point: the future does not grow out of our intentions, fears, hopes or stories; it just grows in unexpected ways, as the telegraph's makers never foresaw the problems their solution created. — 00:04:51

    “The future just grows.”

  • ★★★ Since he cannot know where we are going, Hank says he has no choice but to be a little excited to see where we end up. — 00:05:22

    “We just have to ride our wet, frail, living chemistry into wherever it leads us.”

00:05:46 — Clip from the first Endlings episode: Martha's death and the passenger pigeon's former abundance

  • ★★ a guest: The Endlings clip says Martha died on September 1, 1914, in Cincinnati, Ohio, aged 29, and with her the passenger pigeon became extinct. — 00:05:46
  • ★★ a guest: The clip says passenger pigeons, a few hundred years earlier, numbered an estimated 3 to 5 billion, darkened the sky for hours, and made up as much as 40% of North America's birds. — 00:06:08 · United States

In the description and comments

  • ★★ The description says every examination of history leaves Hank with no certainty beyond a fairly modest time horizon. — video description
  • ★★ The description advises doing what you can with what you have, remembering that nothing can be done without moments of joy and a life of connection. — video description

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: artificial intelligence · Endlings · Martha · passenger pigeon · telegraphy

Also: People: John James Audubon

Projects: Bizarre Beasts

Organizations: AOL · Threads · TikTok · Twitter · YouTube

Concepts: Economic bubble · empathy · Human extinction · negativity bias · recommender system · trust

Places: Cincinnati · Hollywood · North America · Ohio · United States

Only in the description or credits: Complexly

Also centred on artificial intelligence: Google in your Brain · Question Tuesday Except I'm an AI · Asking an AI Image Generator for Pizza Johns · AI tells me if AI will write novels. · Things are Changing Very Fast · After 12 hours in LA I'm a stand-up comic doing ASMR with a side gig as a music promoter

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