The Future Before Us

There is a frightening amount of doom and gloom surrounding artificial intelligence.

Our minds are so simple sometimes. Desperately attached to what we have now, yet longing for more. We don’t always know what we want or how we’ll get it, but we do know for sure that it’s something other than this.

We string along with the clock, matching our steps to its tick. We clock in and out, we watch scheduled programming, we eat a meal at roughly the same time. Hardly any chance to chase after that next great moment.

Our moments of today were all created by humans of the past, who dared to look life in the eyes and flash a wink. Who refused to settle at the hand of nature and instead took a leap towards something else entirely.

Creating things so very human that it’s like it was meant to happen.

With each of these discoveries, creations, and inventions, someone elsewhere moaned about how it might be bad for them. This life they know at this exact moment, perfectly fine but far from extraordinary, dare not be tempted by some new thing.

This new thing was the railroad, then the automobile, then the television, aircraft, computer, and cell phone. All inventions that allowed for the greatness of our modern world to bloom and blossom, creating times so good that our ancestors chuckle at our complaints.

Our life now is full of such filler; data entry, menial advertising, undivided attention during travel. Think of all the time we spend doing silly tasks that something else could easily do for us.

The jobs we have now are not good ones. We hear people complain all of their lives about how much they hate working, how they’d quit tomorrow if they won the lottery, and so on. Then a new technology arises that can erase those complaints for eternity, creating a truly free world where your time no longer has to be sold for money, and it is met with intense resistance.

Folks need money, of course. We will figure out how to get that ironed out once necessary. But we humans are quite good at adapting.

Some will be made zombies by AI, chatting with a robot and watching short-form content all day, every day. But anyone drawn to live that way is already living that way now. There are just extra steps getting in the way of them doing that more.

There will be another sect, a much larger one, that spends this time wisely. It reads more, writes more, learns instruments. It takes in so much information that webs start to form between ideas, creating a new one entirely.

This is the process from which everything great was born. Experience and a firm relationship with the things you are experiencing. The more time given to one thing, the easier it becomes to connect to other pieces of yourself.

It is the modern world that shows us this is possible for all of us. But it is also the modern world that prevents most of us from discovering this reality.

Now, we protest data centers, which use way less water than you may have heard.

This is not some billionaire scam to dry the wells and extract whatever wealth they don’t have. This is a connective tissue between all humans, leveling the playing field more than ever.

It is not all good. Kids are relying on it to act as their own brain. It is not a complement to their mind, but instead a replacement altogether. These people will fade to the periphery, as they would have anyway.

But like the kid that was too poor to afford a piano but could download a free piano app on his iPad, or the destitute country boy that was able to get to his good-paying job in the city via car, AI will have its own ways of opening a door for someone that might have otherwise never even considered testing the lock.

Trains derail and cars collide, but we would never consider going back on those now. AI will have its pressure points, too. But to close your eyes on innovation is to reject the human spirit.