Randomism

Randomism holds that human beings are the only random element in the known universe. Every other system, given enough data, resolves to a pattern. A human decision does not. The mind is a black box of experience, trauma, upbringing, and chance. No amount of computation has yet predicted what one person will do next. Humans are not binary. They are closer to quantum, an infinite range of possible outcomes collapsing into one unrepeatable choice.

Anything in this life that is not random does not generate emotion. Joy, surprise, love, humor, art, a strike in bowling, a cat doing something absurd. Each depends on an outcome nobody could predict. A world that becomes fully predictable has nothing left worth watching, remembering, or feeling.

The danger of this century is that humanity turns itself into a machine. When everyone asks the same systems how to act, what to say, what to believe, and whom to love, people stop acting from their own experience and start acting from a shared instruction set. The differences between them flatten. The species persists while the trait that defined it, unpredictability, erodes. Extinction without death. A population of people who are all the same.

Artificial intelligence makes this convenient. It does not make it necessary. Both the responsibility and the choice are human. Humanity will probably learn to control its machines. It has never learned to control itself.

Randomism is pro-human, not anti-technology. The right use of a powerful tool is to put better information in front of a person so the person can decide. The wrong use is to let the tool decide. Data, not directives. Once a system replaces a person's own judgment, that person has begun to disappear.

From this follows a duty. Preserve randomness. Protect the parts of life that cannot be optimized. Keep the unscripted conversation, the unplanned day, the decision made without consulting anything. Leave room for mistakes, since most surprises start as one. Proof that a real person is on the other side will become the scarcest resource there is.

Stay human. Enjoy the moment.

Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

John von Neumann, 1951