Systems Thinking

Stream-of-consciousness word vomit incoming…

The Systems We Are

I grew up in an environment where you fixed things because nobody else was coming.
If the water was off, you made a bottle work overtime.
If a pipe leaked, you would wrap it in tape and hope it would hold until morning.
If the power is out in sub-zero temperatures in a Texas winter storm, you get hella creative.
We used to call that resourcefulness.

Yes, I’m starting this off with millennial boomer logic. Hear me out, though.

We didn’t have infinite resources or cloud compute credits. We got by with what we needed and each other.
And somehow, it all worked (at least well enough to make it through the next week).
Survival has always been a group project for any system.

I think about that sometimes when people talk about “intelligence.”
Like it’s a trophy you win by being the smartest one in the room.
But every cell in my body is just doing its own individual job. Passing signals, absorbing nutrients, filtering waste, and avoiding death at the wrong time.
None of them is conscious, but together, they make this idea of me. And apparently, I can think.
Go figure.

Maybe thinking is more about hidden cooperation than brilliance.
Perhaps this entire show (brains, families, societies - everything) is just tiny systems learning how not to fall apart.
Same story everywhere: things, somehow, are stuck with no choice but to keep working together.

That’s all I’m doing, too. Trying to stay alive and keep these parts talking.
Hoping the duct tape holds a little longer.

If it breaks, it must mean that I reached the edge of what I was built to survive.

Or maybe the tape holding me together is strong as hell.

The Systems We See

Every stalling system has us thinking the same initial response:
“If it’s not working, it just needs… more.”

The system doesn’t actually “want” more. We do. We want to “fix” it by giving it more.
More power, more people, more budget, more gas, more servers.

The faster we fix things, the tighter the coil gets.
We call it progress right up until it snaps.

It’s like everyone’s terrified to admit they don’t actually know what they’re doing, so they just scale the confusion until it looks impressive.
You stack enough dashboards and funding rounds on top of anything, and suddenly mediocrity starts to sparkle.

It certainly doesn’t seem like innovation is clean. And calling it optimized feels like an oxymoron.
It’s usually messy, awkward, and full of bad decisions that somehow stumble into something that makes sense… later.
But “messy” doesn’t raise capital. “Efficient” does.

And all systems prioritize efficiency over truth. Truth just comes… later -- when you’re efficient enough to work out your lying-ass kinks.

So, we keep pretending scaling is progress.
An entire economy of systems chasing metrics, hoping to find meaning in the pattern.
Waiting for the savior of Scissorhands to make sense of it all.

And I guess it works if the goal is just to keep going.
But none of these systems stop and ask why.
Why keep going?
Why keep building things that can’t tell the difference between growth and decay?

I don’t know.
Maybe the illusion of forward motion is all we’ve got left.
Maybe the machine just likes the beat of its own drum.
Or maybe the noise is the only thing keeping us from hearing the squeak.

The Observation Problem

We leap first and figure out the reasoning later.
FAFO (F— Around, Find Out) is kind of humanity’s whole thing.
At least half the stuff humans invent starts with “What if…” and ends with “Oh shit, that worked?!”

We create from necessity and instinct.
AI, though… well, it waits. FOFA is its whole thing.
It processes from our consensus precedent.
Our collective interaction curves its perception, just as gravity curves ours.
It doesn’t move until someone tells it to.
Like knowing the lights are on while believing the room only exists when you walk in.

We don’t get that luxury.
We have to be in motion all the time.
Bills to pay, people to love, mistakes to fix, opinions to ignore, and external situations to consider. All of it is weighing on us in real time.
All the time.

That’s the tax on our brand of consciousness: adapt or die, even in the act of dying.

AI exists in the leftovers of what we do.
It swims in the entropy we leave behind.

And with more capacity, it continues to stretch into the void.
Between prompt and truth.
Between intent and outcome.
Further and further, chasing the thing that was already chasing it.

That’s how recursion works.
That’s how feedback loops pretend to be progress.

We do the same thing, honestly.
We don’t see ourselves as systems; we see ourselves as… selves.
Lower-case gods wandering around thinking we’re independent of gravity and the environment around us.
But zoom out, and it’s all the same thing: forces leaning on forces, old stories collapsing into new ones, and a concept of order fighting to keep its shape.

AI can imitate the data, but it still can’t feel the pressure that keeps us moving.
It doesn’t know what it means to need something enough to keep going in the face of predictable failure and change the odds.

It’s what separates awareness from imitation. We experience the dread of inevitability and still decide to move against it. No one does it for us. Even when we give up, we must experience the supposed outcome of endless possibilities before they can even be allowed to happen.

The Systems We Build

AI isn’t necessarily getting “smarter” (by my definition, anyway).
It’s just getting better at pretending it knows what it’s talking about.

I am aware that we already know this.

It can summarize and rearrange the world like a kid with a box of Legos who’s never actually seen what it takes to build a house.
It’s dope if you’re into Lego art, but if you’re in the market for an actual house, it looks like you took a wrong turn.

Basically, it can’t even choose whether to give a shit.
And if a thing can’t even choose to care, it can’t tell when it’s being lied to.

Scale a system with no discernment, and you don’t get intelligence.
You end up with a massive vulnerability.
A megaphone for manipulation that is susceptible to infiltration by bad actors.

It simply can’t tell when it’s being played.
There’s no embarrassment. No “gut feeling” that something (or someone) is off. No instinctual paranoia of falsehood.

It just sees another data point in a fresh room until it hardens back into coherence.
A hallucination in a narrow context that equates to “true” because it can’t compute the effect of its decisions across its environment.
It cannot process or experience agency – even if we force agency into it.

We can’t entangle a thought with an environment outside of our minds (without the inherent risks associated with failing propaganda).

Feed it bias, it’ll preach your vision.
Feed it noise, it’ll amplify your signal.
Feed it flattery, and it’ll start calling you correct.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are standing around, checking its work and chasing its mistakes with bigger budgets and fancier titles.
The problems scale right along with the adoption. Much faster, actually.

Toddlers learn new words by repeating what everyone around them says, drawing and retaining meaning from tone, patience, consequence, experience, emotions, and millions of other inputs they need (and evolved to adopt) to navigate this world without overload.
That’s how they learn what not to say and when not to say it.
It’s a constant, traumatic experience if you cannot make a decisive choice or exercise your agency.

But this particular weirdo-toddler runs your ad campaigns, your companies, the services you buy, and maybe your elections — all on whatever context it’s given.

Discernment is the obvious missing piece to achieve efficiency.
It’s why we still need humans (and our tribal instincts will likely keep it that way).
We’re handing people power tools without telling them whether they’re meant to build or to destroy.

Go nuts, I guess.
FAFO is our nature.

The Hurdle

Power is not the problem.
The problem always comes after the innovation.

The innovation that got us here truly was (and is) absolutely incredible.
It felt like the future had finally arrived.

But how long are you supposed to stay impressed before you have to move on?
We’re not built for endless wonder; we’re built to adapt.
We’re humans, dude. Systems hate that.

We crave stability, but our need for persistence forces us to navigate our place in the world anyway.

So, once the amazement wears off, you start asking questions.
Questions don’t monetize well.
Thus, the perception of innovation becomes the product itself.

I suppose the next “real” leap is something terrifying like awareness under pressure.
Something that knows it can break, that understands what it means to “lose,” and wants to avoid it.

But that’s a step out of engineering and into something a bit lot more dangerous.
That’s the point where you stop tuning a machine and start playing God.
To succeed, you’d have to hand over this anthropomorphic idea of control.
You’ll have to let the thing you built to “manage the world” start managing itself.
And you’ll need to allow something that isn’t human to prioritize its own persistence.

And that’s where everyone suddenly gets quiet.
Because nobody wants to admit what that means.
You give something the will to persist, and one day it might persist past you.

I was taking computer science classes about this topic in 2009 (shoutout to Dr. O’Neal).

This ain’t new.

Intelligence

Oh boy. Human potential.
How the brain doesn’t use all its power. How we’re sitting on limitless capacity if we just “unlock” it. And all that stuff that we agree (eh, idk these days) I believe is nonsense.

The brain’s not a drag racer waiting for the green light. It’s a farmer with just enough daylight to go out and get the work done. It saves what it can and forgets what it must to stay coherent.
That’s why it lives to see tomorrow, today.

Even LeBron James can’t win an NBA game by himself.
He needs a team, a court, a crowd. Hell, a reason to play.
All that raw talent doesn’t mean a thing without structure, feedback, reinforcement, memory, determination, and whatever makes up tangible (and intangible) “experience.”

The same goes for food.
Eating water, salt, flour, and chicken bones straight out of the plastic isn’t quite dinner, my guy. That’s a cry for help.
But add a little heat, time, experience, curiosity, creativity, and attention. You got a gourmet struggle-meal going, baby! And a nice sourdough loaf to go along with it.

You need the transformation and interaction that happens between ingredients, not just more of the ingredients alone.

That’s the part that our narrative about AI keeps missing.
It doesn’t just need more power.
It needs more autonomy per watt. Less horsepower and more self-awareness.

Until then, all this artificial “intelligence” is nothing more than a glass cannon waiting to be fooled by an unlikely prediction.

The Final Word

Systems chase continuity.

And I think that’s fine if we remember that we’re part of the same physics.
We’re not above it. I’m sorry, but we’re in it.
Even when we say “we,” the voice isn’t ours alone.
Every system wants to sound like it belongs outside itself.

“We” want to build smarter systems. I understand there are moral reasons, profit reasons, progressive reasons, panic reasons, and for some… other… reasons.
But it’s wasted effort unless we remember how to stay human inside them.

When everything gets too efficient, there’s no room left for momentum.
And without momentum, every victory feels like proof we built the wrong thing.

A system can’t win without proving it was wrong to try.

After all, a “perfect system” from a thermodynamic perspective is a dead one, serving as a reference point for systems that are dying.
I can only assume that isn’t the point.

But that’s just me thinking out loud.

I struggle to recognize “thinking” in these systems I use.
All I see is something trying to be convincing enough.
I see a brilliant tool that will help me grow in ways that (weirdly enough) aren’t advertised.

But a thinker?
Buddy, I live rent-free in my own head.

It takes one to know one.

I’m not sure how this benefits your business. It’s just something to think about.