Transition Point

It is a human tendency to take our recent past and project it in a linear fashion into the future. The next twenty years, we figure, will more or less unfold as the last twenty years have. Not a chance.

What protestors of Western culture forget is that they are only able to hold their protests, broadcast their views and write their articles because of the very same freedoms they are fighting to suppress. By severing the roots, they will also kill the tree under whose branches they shelter.

The paradox of change is that while everyone says they want change, not many people actually like it, and even less want to lead it.

Technology provides access to more power than our ancestors would have thought possible but does not guide us as to what to do with that power. Similarly, the market provides us with endless choices but does not tell us how to use these choices. And our liberal, individualist and faithless state gives us freedom, but provides no intellectual, moral or spiritual guidance for how to use that freedom.

“Like the story of the steam drill against John Henry, the machine will be victorious because it doesn’t get tired and keeps on going long after a human worker will have dropped dead from exhaustion. The modern-day steam drill is likely to be an AI system, and John Henry is played by the planner, doctor, analyst, stockbroker or accountant who believes that they can process more data and crunch more numbers than the new machine overlords. They can’t.”

The increasing use of artificial intelligence in the design and development of virtual worlds and virtual friends will make them more advanced, more personal, and more attuned to your likes and dislikes. They will allow you to live out your wildest fantasies in a matrix of your own creation, whereas back in the real world you are stuck in your apartment that you’ve been unable to find the energy to tidy for weeks.

The industrial age has transformed our material well-being, but these improvements have come at the cost of our beliefs: belief in our special place in the universe; belief in an omnipresent god; belief in country and community; belief in monogamy and marriage, and belief in our values. What, then, holds up the foundations of society when these beliefs finally fall away?

As machines increasingly do more of the work, and real-life relationships lose their allure, then the allegory of Plato's Cave becomes real. A mass of people living inside, disconnected from those who live their lives outside, systematically unable or unwilling to participate in the competition of life because they cannot stand the unpredictability of reality.

The near future is going to be defined by the outcomes of a battle between those in control of the machines, and those controlled by them. Corporations have become richer and more powerful than countries, but without any form of societal contract or responsibility to citizens or communities. They are not the Quakers of old. Their loyalty to you starts and ends with your worth as a consumer and as a data provider.