We are an emotional species, it’s always been entirely about feelings and games of pretend. We briefly dabbled with the idea that we were a species of reason and logic, but the advent of being able to share our thoughts and ideas with anyone, anywhere, instantly, has dashed all our hopes that we can rise above our biological nature. We simply cannot handle things we weren’t designed by evolution to handle, and as soon as we get distressed, our brains work overtime to invent a story to explain how we feel.

You do this a thousand times a day about small things. The brain doesn’t care if the story it presents you makes sense, it just has to tie every feeling to something it thinks it knows. Which is why you have doctors and nurses becoming anti-vax science deniers and why so many people are so ready to accept an alternative view of the universe even if makes no sense and there’s no evidence for it.

We are now currently making machines that can connect with those emotional responses and create new stories for us and make us feel things. This should be incredibly worrying, even as we’re suffering under climate change.