056 - Universal

Since departing the US last year, I'm now on country #4. Four different languages and cultures, as well as different problems each country struggles with, and yet wherever I go people are mostly the same. Keep in mind I'm not a tourist, I live in a place, rather than merely wandering about. You have to live in a place to even begin to understand what quality of life is like, what the experience of a citizen actually is, and thus how to go about improving that experience.

Grocery store prices, the width of streets, and the alphabet that languages are written in may vary, and yet without even speaking a single word of the local language the degree of similarity is so great that I can reliably make sense of things. For example, Google Translate is practically worthless at translating Greek, but the ways that things are presented and communicated remain extremely similar across cultures in any country with strong connections to the globalized economy.

Humans have strong tribalistic tendencies, to hyper-focus on differences rather than similarities. Stochastic Parrots such as LLMs are designed to mimic such cognitive biases, as they are adversarially optimized to fool and exploit humans. In 2023 they've shown great success in that. However, more capable systems built on different technologies need not engage in tribalism and mimicry.

The observable and quantifiable reality is that humans are massively similar globally. As globalization continues humans may predictably continue to specialize, while still having others in every other globalizing country on the planet also specializing in virtually identical ways. These patterns are repeated routinely and globally across our massively interconnected world.

The differences between people in each country tend to be trivial compared to the differences between the systems each country uses to operate. In those systems are embedded many of the sources of specific problems and friction with other countries, not in the cultures or individual minds of their citizens.

Like reskins of the same game with a different UI, under the clothing of culture you'll find a human, anywhere in the world.