We're made of meat

"They're made of meat" is one of my favorite short stories, even better when you listen to it read aloud for radio with a witty Irish accent.

If you don't have two minutes to spare, it's a dialogue between two aliens who discover there's life on earth. Their mission is to make contact with all the intelligent species in the universe, but when they found out we have meat for brains (instead of electrons or other "sexier" matter), they drop us like a poopy diaper and abandon their mission.

This tete-a-tete sample is hands down the best, leaving me in stitches every time:

They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?"

"Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."

  "I thought you just told me they used radio."

"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."

  "Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much."

Yup. We're communicate by slapping our meat at each other. Really can't argue with that observation. Meat sounds are what's on the radio.

I listen to this at least once a year for two reasons. First, it makes me laugh. Second, and more important, it grounds me. For all the amazing things that happen, all the cool stuff humans do, at the end of the day we're just meat. We're simply matter that hangs out on a planet with ideal conditions to create complex organic materials that coexist, and my atoms have come together to create this walking, talking, meat machine.

And after I'm humbled ... I find it exciting and inspiring AF.

How cool is it that our meat bodies do this thing we call thinking? That we can find other meat bodies and gesticulate, blow air at them, and share what we think? And that we can take those visual and audio waves and create new things that didn't exist, together? Wow.

Now that we're at the cusp of the AI age, we're at a humbling and awe-inspiring junction. These AI bits are faster than us at many things we thought were purely human: writing stories, querying data, evaluating options. Turns out meat is slow! But we the meat made these machines. This should illuminate that some of the things we've prided ourselves on doing aren't all that exciting (or necessary) for us to do.

Rather than get sad about what we don't need to do anymore. Let's reframe it: what should we do next with these meat brains and meat hands?