I read John Green’s brilliant and heartfelt book Everything is Tuberculosis. The way he weaves history, events and tuberculosis in a narrative about the struggles of a boy and his family – just made me sit up and think. It reinforced a realization I’ve long held: that everything is, in fact, everything.
I have always been fascinated by the how little things impact big changes. On top of that, most of our history is a fluke. The general didn’t win the war because of his strategy but because the enemy’s army was decimated by malaria. A lot of the inventions were not inventions but accidents that happened at the right place and the right time.
As Matt Ridley says in his book The evolution of everything, most of our civilization’s events and concepts – Money, religion, economy, morality – have evolved not from a master plan but from trial and error events. After all, evolution in biology is just a series of successful accidents.
AI is such a hype because they chose the name artificial intelligence, instead of nonhuman intelligence (Doesn’t have the same ring to it). Most of our wealth is in debt.
I want to explore this connection of little things with the big things. So, let me try and write how our world is basically shaped and dictated by benign things in this series I am calling Everything is.