My grandmother, who lived to be just one year older than I am now, witnessed awesome historic events and changes in the world… some marvelous and some unimaginably horrific. It’s difficult for me to envision what the world I won’t see will be like… how events will alter what is considered a good life and perhaps what it even means to be a human being…
Our ingenuity and technologies have given us a way of living we take for granted, but one that is delicately balanced on dependencies of complex systems and available power… The vulnerabilities of all of this was predicted at the end of the 19th Century… full awareness is coming just now.
And now the prospect of AI... of “machines” taking over all aspects of human endeavor and potentially becoming sentient, capable or generating a separate existence, has begun to seem real, even though it’s been integrated into our daily lives in almost everything for decades. In some ways this very platform is a creature of AI… the algorithm, which we feed with our photos, chats, likes, and comments. There is real hardship ahead in job losses and how much of what we call “work” will change, but the real panic is coming from the idea that AI may take over areas that feel sacred to human specialness… areas involving creativity and places of intimate contact, like medicine.
This comes on top of a crisis of beliefs, whereby we are presented with evidence of an impersonal universe governed by laws, largely mathematic in nature… or on the other, traditions of philosophy and religion which remain hard to reconcile with the events in life. The choice seems to be either coincidence, chaos, and chance… or, fate, preordination, and providence.
Clearly, the way forward is going to involve a real change in what we view as a good life and how to achieve it. Hopefully, it will come through visionary leaders rather than catastrophic events. And, we need to finally realize that we can no longer afford to live our lives as a zero-sum game. We can only win when everyone does.